The Last Airbender Is Tencent And It Can Bend The DNA of US Health Care
The Last Airbender is Tencent and it can bend the DNA of US Health Care in CRISPR Repeat — stunning structures of CRISPR spacer integrase in action! CRISPR, you know, that cool gene editing tool — and its latest avatar.
Define soft power: over 80% of Chinese government members are trained and experienced scientific engineers; whereas this proportion falls to 10% in the US. While Hong-Kong is said to be driving fintech’s growth in Asia (source: Silkroad, September 2017, a review edited and published by Cathay Dragon, the low-cost company owned by Cathay Pacific Airlines), China might be quietly trying to drive health tech growth… worldwide.
“In recent years, Tencent has funded a slew of U.S. biotechnology and digital health ventures. According to data from start-up research firms Crunchbase and Rock Health, they include:
- Grail, an ambitious venture to screen for cancer in the blood
- Scanadu, a futuristic “medical tricorder” device that shut down in 2016
- Karius, a genetics company that tests for infectious disease
- Clear Labs, a food testing company
- HomeHero, a company that brought technology to home care before it announced it was pivoting to a new (unannounced) business
- CliniCloud, a company building a connected home medical kit
- Circle Medical, a tech-friendly primary care provider.
The company also invests in more indirect ways.
Tencent led a $155 million round in health and artificial intelligence company iCarbonX, which subsequently secured a $100 million deal with the U.S.-based patient social networking company PatientsLikeMe. The goal for the partnership is to merge various forms of health data, like genomics and patient-reported symptoms, with AI to further our understanding of human disease.” (Source)
Precision medicine’s new hub: iCarbonX? The company is planning on managing the health of no less than 100 billion human beings — both curative and preventive medicine. Fred Raillard is the Creative CEO, Co-founder and Creative Chief Officer of FRED & FARID, a social, content, tech solution for brand companies based in Paris, Shanghai, Beijing and New York. According to Raillard, China is about ten years ahead of everybody else in digital economy. Remember what it was like in health care? First, there was the era of paper, which was followed by eHealth, then mobile health era. We are now shifting to health care in the A.I. mode. China is simply leapfrogging from the paper to the A.I. mode — I am quoting from memory Scanadu’s co-founder Walter de Brouwer. Now, what does A.I. have to do with health care? The answer is plain and simple: your DNA & medical data on your smartphone. Browse it on iTunes, own it and monetise it. The sooner the industry understands consumers (patients) will drive this revolution, the better. The first industry to understand this won’t be the pharmaceutical, or the biotech, or the insurance industry. It will be something more overarching, like the A.I. branch. Software is eating hardware. Also true in health care, apparently. Do you know in which part of the world middle class is thriving and breeding most quickly? It used to be in the US; not any more. The accurate answer is now: Asia. Guess who was always at the heart of major revolutions in health care? Middle class. Who in the world would be most interested in measuring air and food quality, discussing their health data with precision medicine specialists? Chinese patients, from middle class.
“China is expected to have more than 800,000 lung cancer cases by 2020 on account of pollution and high smoking rates. It also has more people living with Alzheimer’s disease than any other country.
“The health-care problems in China are huge,” said Ted Driscoll, a Silicon Valley-based medical investor with the Chinese investment firm Decheng Capital. “They (Chinese investors) are interested in any start-ups that have a novel way of dealing with it.”
Some of these U.S. companies have not yet expanded to China, but others used the investment to build a presence in the country.
One of Grail’s first moves was to merge with a Chinese company called Cirina, founded by notable Chinese scientist Dennis Lo. That deal, if successful, would allow Grail to commercialize its cancer test in both Asian and Western markets.” (Source)
Chinese President Xi Jinping knows he has to massively invest in advanced biotech, to avoid the fall of his government. Urban upper-middle class in Beijing and Shanghai (mainly, but not only) is pissed off about what they call airpocalypse. Algae biofuels may come to the rescue (one day), but it is believed it will be quicker and simpler (and cheaper?) to speed up health tech thanks to the merge of A.I. and medicine. Xi Da Da (Chinese President’s pet name on social networks like Weibo and WeChat) has tasked BATX (the four leading digital companies in the Middle Kingdom) with this work.
I must confess I am surprised e-mails are still so extensively used in the US — both for work and private life. In China, e-mails are dead (and so is spamming), as everything in social life runs through WeChat (paying, ordering food or a Didi car, professional visioconference, etc.). Also, I am surprised there seems to be nobody to federate the advanced biotech community in places like California for example. High-profile individuals certainly exist, but they seem to be driving the competition in science; not the general effort to move health care to the next step. I call this a transition problem. Recently, Merel, a biologist and startup founder in San Diego, was telling me US patients are impatient to monetise their medical and DNA (RNA, microbiome, etc) data — for example, sell it to pharmaceutical or biotech companies. But this simply won’t happen (well, it hasn’t until now). How do we transition to a patient-centric business model, and when will this take place? Insurance, pharmaceutical or biotech companies are not very eager to get involved in such matters — beyond a bit of hype. But A.I. is. Especially in China. It’s not hype; it’s soft power.
Is Pharma the new Kodak?
We all remember how Kodak missed the digital photography revolution. Now, some say a groundbreaking event has just happened: “FDA approval brings first gene therapy to the United States” http://bit.ly/2vML3oK. Others say defending a half-million-dollar price tag for a drug as a bargain is “unacceptable, as rich people already live longer, and this will widen the biological gap.” — Bertalan Mesko, MD, PhD (Europe).
Whoever fails to see that patients will drive the next medical revolution, by owning and monetising their genotype and phenotype data, will miss the advanced biotech revolution.
As a fan of sci-fi rock star Liu Cixin (Three Body Problem, book and movie), I found it quite interesting to inquire about hidden (or implicit) cultural meanings of “three”.
Hence, “Three Body Problem” is also a fictional story about an indecisive world (Western?) versus a highly decisive or determined one (China? Eastern?)… I’m impatient to see what Bertalan Mesko, MD PhD (Europe) has to say about this… Meanwhile, I’ll be waiting for some kind of joint-venture between Tencent and Illumina…
Catherine Coste, MITx 7.00x, 7.QBWx, 7.28.x1–2 certified
Proud member of the Walking Gallery of Health Care, founded by US activist and artist Regina Holliday
