Pasteurizing Tech With The French Touch
This is episode four of The French Tech Comedy.
(Read episode one, two, three)
Geronimo Faber is sitting in a pizzeria at the Quartier Latin in Paris. It is late August, he is surrounded by a small group of microbiologists, PhD students and post-docs at the Institut Pasteur. Among them is a young French journalist, working with Rue 89. Geronimo wants to make sure the Parisian press will not depict him as a proponent of immortality, which he is not, really. He merely wants to live for a couple of centuries, no more, no less. And to stay healthy for the first part of his life, which includes 99.99% of the two-hundred-year lifespan he foresees for himself, with a 50% chance of happening, according to him. Right now, though, the journalist was feeling like he was taking part in a remake of the movie “Interview with the Vampire”.
“ — It’s not immortality, really. Think of it like a vintage car. If you do continued maintenance, routine maintenance and repair, your vintage car will be able to go on for much longer than it would have, had you just waited for it to break down, with no preventive maintenance at all. That’s exactly what ageing is about. There are some in the world who see the inevitable degradation of the body as just a biological engineering problem — and one that can be solved. I’m a biomedical gerontologist; not a vampire. My focus is on using regenerative medicines to repair damage underlying the diseases of ageing. I claim that the first person to live to a thousand is alive today.”
“ — But will there be a moral imperative to make these technologies available to everyone on earth? To be honest, it seems a bit absurd to say that in a world where we can’t even guarantee everyone on earth the basic conditions for life.”
“ — Exactly. That’s what we need to discuss now. The science of ageing is advancing. Not as fast as I would wish, since it is woefully underfunded, but it is advancing nonetheless. We as a society need to make choices and discuss the social aspects of this scientific revolution.”
Meanwhile, also in Paris, at the Doctors 2.0 conference, Gene-i&us startup founder, French biologist Frederic Mougin, is the keynote speaker for the session about digital medicine. The title of his presentation is quite catchy: “Your DNA & medical data on your smartphone. Browse it on iTunes, own it & monetize it”.
Mougin is based in San Francisco, he is performing his keynote presentation via Skype. Right now, he is showing his slides and commenting them. “ — We are developing a patient-centric tool for patients to collect, share & monetise their medical, genomics, lifestyle, IoT data with academics & the pharmaceutical industry. We are pioneering the management and use of personal health data by facilitating the collection and aggregation of that data onto smartphones. Our platform preserves the individual’s ownership and privacy and enables them to collect diverse biometric information ranging from genetic blueprint and medical, behaviour and lifestyle information. More than ever, individuals need a solution to control and organise their personal health information. Gene-i&us is uniquely positioned to provide individuals control of their personal health data in order to facilitate sharing with healthcare providers, payers and life science organisations leading to improved healthcare and smarter health discovery.” (1)
During the questions session, Mougin showed the work he has been doing with a handful of US patients associations, how the enrolment of patients in most recent pharmaceutical studies was enabled, eased and accelerated thanks to his app, and the outcome for these patients. It was very recent stuff, with the benefit of (lacking) hindsight, more should be accomplished. Mougin wanted to work with health insurers, industry, “the pharma world”, tech giants, everywhere, possibly in China. Patients. Investors. He made it sound like he had pitched them all, around the globe (US, UK, Netherlands, Canada, China, Japan). At last he was coming to France, his native country. It was difficult to decide if Mougin was a worldwide touring rock star, the Gandhi of health care (“putting the patient at the centre of the health care system in the US!?!”), or a biologist from Academia with rather ambitious business projects. At the closing of Parisian Doctors 2.0 conference, Mougin said Facebook would be holding a special breakfast for drug marketers about recruiting people for clinical trials, and he would attend this event.
“ — I just got an invitation to speak there,” he said proudly.
Nono was back in France, for just 10 days. Vacation, and visiting mon and dad, and his four brothers.
“ — I had Neufchatel cheese for lunch.”
“ — What is it?”
“ — Like camembert. But heart-shaped.”
“ — What is camembert?”
“ — My favorite cheese.”
“ — What is the shape of kammbert?”
“ — Round.”
By this time, Nono had been able to recover his iPhone. He was now talking with Yuki, inquiring about her first concert at the Suntory Hall in Tokyo that had just taken place.
“ — How did it go?”
She spoke for at least twenty minutes, listing all the incidents, she even nearly had a heart attack because she was so upset she couldn’t get on well with one of her colleagues, and then there was this piece of music she played, composed by Baude Cordier, she just loved the piece but the public didn’t seem to connect with it…
“ — Who?”
“ — Baude Cordier. He is French. You must know him.”
“ — I don’t think so.”
“ — Renaissance. Musician and composer, writer. You don’t know Baude Cordier’s musical heart? That’s amazing.”
Yuki was torturing herself, trying to decide if everything was conducted smoothly during this Première, trying to look for hidden pitfalls, etc.
“ — So everything went well,” concluded Nono, smiling from ear to ear.
Meanwhile, Mougin was not done with the pitching. He was now discussing with an executive working in the pet industry in San Diego, California.
“ — Here, people are spending fortunes for their dog. So imagine. You have this QR code on your dog’s ultra-cozy coat, that you can scan. What my app, iGroove, does is that it will look for the dog’s genomic information in its database, and it will convert the DNA data related to this specific dog into music. Cool tunes. Based on the dog’s DNA. So, you are a passer-by, you see a dog with a coat that has a QR code on it — it means the dog, or rather his owner, is a client of my app — yes, I’ve got his DNA and I can convert it into music.”
“ — So lemme get this straight. I am taking a walk on the street, I see the QR code on the dog’s coat, I scan it with my smart phone and I get to hear the music played by the dog’s DNA?!”
“ — Exactly. How cool is that?”
“ — You mean, you can create real music from anybody’s DNA? Really? You can convert people’s DNA into cool tunes?!”
“ — We are working on it. With post-docs from the Harvard Med School. And we already have the clients. All we need now is a new round of funding.”
(1) This information was found under following link: http://portablegenomics.com/about/
