Healthcare
Food is Health Thesis
What is the difference between Food is Health vs. Food is Medicine? A lot. Food is Health is about avoiding medicine. It's about what we need from the food system to be healthy without seeing the doctor.
For 400k years, food nourished us to be healthy and strong. Now we get diet related diseases without...
Investment Roadmap: What We Target and Avoid
Harnessing the Force of Creative Destruction: A Thesis in "Food is Health"
We believe in the power of innovation to make it better. Our investment focus is on the key lever points where a specific innovation drives consumer adoption, lowers cost, and drives productivity gains in Food, Health, and Agriculture.
Innovation...
The Biology of Aging and Longevity
Over the last few decades, technologies such as gene sequencing have revolutionized the way we understand aging and its implications for disease. Aging means a different thing than it did just a few decades ago, opening up a number of new strategies and technologies to deal with its effects.
Today, longevity...
What Will COVID-19 Mean for the Future of Healthcare?
While there is very little good to be said about the ongoing COVID-19 situation, we can only hope that we recover from this pandemic while also making the healthcare and food systems better and stronger than they were before.
...Here’s What’s Coming Next in Cancer Diagnostics
In 2019 over 600,000 people died from cancer in the United States alone. One of the primary drivers behind these high mortality rates for cancer is late diagnosis. For this reason, we're seeing increasing demand for noninvasive methods to detect cancer easily and at earlier stages.
...Therapeutics and Inflammation: What’s Coming Next?
Many of the major medical conditions that we face in our lives share an underlying cause: chronic inflammation.
...Investing at the Nexus of Food and Health
Almost three years ago, iSelect strategically refocused its investment thesis on identifying the synergies between food and healthcare. At the time, food and healthcare were two completely independent, siloed verticals. But, the fact is, the more that we understand about disease and the better that we understand the science of food, the more clearly...
System C: The Convergence of Food, Health and Innovation
We're here to talk about food system innovation. When we first started this conference, we talked about agtech, and as investors we also focus on healthcare and the convergence of healthcare and agriculture. Innovation is now being discussed as food system innovation. And, so we've invited you all and eager to have you participate in...
What Researchers are Learning About the Biome Might Just Save Your Life… or Kill You
Over Thanksgiving I overheard some parents talking about their children and dating. Apparently some young adults are now using 23andMe to determine compatibility before a date becomes a serious relationship. The parents mentioned an attempt to sneak some hair and getting it tested, to make sure the date was sane.
Nothing really surprises me anymore.
...How Blood-Based Diagnostics are Changing Cancer Care
iSelect hosts a Deep Dive webinar on a novel innovation topic on the first and third Wednesdays of each month at 9 a.m. central. Our most recent session focused on early cancer diagnosis using blood-based tools. Testing patients for cancer has typically involved a tissue biopsy -- collecting the cells in question for closer examination....
What’s the Future of Nutrition? Addiction
The modern world has a serious problem with sugar.
The average American consumes more than 129 pounds of the stuff each year, according to the USDA, more than double what we ate two generations ago. And, unlike in previous decades when most sweeteners came from cane and beet sugars, today the vast majority are...
You Are What You Think: How New Brain Care Advances Are Increasingly Person-Centered
It’s an exciting time in the field of brain science.
Researchers are working on new speech analysis tools for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.
New studies have shown that retina scans can be used to detect early signs of the disease, long before typical symptoms show up.
And blood and brain metabolites are...
4 Trends We’re Watching in Healthcare in 2019
Healthcare is massive economic burden in this country. According to the National Health Expenditure Accounts, the federal agency that has tracked healthcare spending in the U.S. since the 1960s, it now totals roughly $3.5 trillion per year, or more than $10,000 per person. As a percentage of GDP, health spending accounts for nearly 18%.
...2 Companies That Are Working to Cure Cancer Right Now
In 2018, an estimated 1,735,350 new cases of cancer were diagnosed in the United States and 609,640 people died as a result of the disease, according to the National Cancer Institute. These numbers are staggering.
The challenge for clinicians and researchers is enormous, especially because cancer behaves differently in different patients. As such, treatments...
How Shifting Spending to Healthy Foods Could Prevent Chronic Illness
The burden of chronic health issues is massive: 90% of the nation’s $3.3 trillion in annual health care expenditures are for people with chronic and mental illness, according to the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP).
Even though in the United States we spend over $10,000 on health care...
Solving the Public Health Crisis by Making Healthy Nutrition as Addictive as Sugar
The modern world has a serious problem with sugar.
The average American consumes more than 129 pounds of the stuff each year, according to the USDA, more than double what we ate two generations ago. And, unlike in previous decades when most sweeteners came from cane...
This Rare Disease Day, Let’s Do More
There are some 7,000 known rare diseases in the world today and they affect an estimated 25-30 million people in the United States alone.
This day, celebrated every year on February 28th, holds special significance to me because my six-year-old son is one of the 1 in 10 Americans with a...
Are We Really Ready for Genetic Testing?
There’s a lot we still don’t know about the power of genetic testing. For one thing, it’s becoming more powerful than ever expected. Already, patients can get gene-based information about their cancer risk, for instance, as well as details about genetic disorders that might impact their children, autism diagnoses, and more.
...Enabling the Next Generation of Healthcare IT
It’s been a long time coming, but technology is finally transforming the healthcare industry, enabling functions and services that were all but unimaginable just a few years ago. Case in point: data.
...Who Has Your DNA? Why Data Privacy Is the Next Battleground in Consumer Genetics
Genetics is changing the world as we know it, and not only in the realm of healthcare and medical science. Whether it’s 23andMe delivering specific details about our ancestry, genetic science being used to united people who have been switched at birth, or even DNA information being used to catch the Golden State Killer, there...
Humanity Is Dehydrated, and It Doesn’t Even Know It Yet
One thing is for sure: we’re not drinking enough water. None of us. And it’s damaging our health. That was the message of a recent article in The New York Times.
...Dehydration Nation: Preventing One of the Most Common Health Risks in Real-Time
Up to three-fourths of Americans are chronically dehydrated, and the condition can be far more debilitating than it might seem. Mild dehydration -- literally, not drinking enough water on a day-to-day basis -- can impair cognitive performance by up to 20%, affecting reaction time, mental accuracy and memory. More severe cases, however, can result can...
RNA Is Becoming the New DNA, Opening New Doors in Medicine
If a person’s DNA is the roadmap of their lifetime health, their RNA is more of a real-time barometer, recording what happens in their body on a minute-by-minute basis. Our DNA stores and transfers genetic information, but remains little changed throughout our lives. At best, it can tell us about the probability we will someday...
Flywheel: Accelerating Discoveries By Creating an App Store for Science
Flywheel is building an archive of scientific developments, methods and tools so that future researchers will be able to build on those discoveries.
...GeneMatters: How Genetic Testing Is Pushing Us Toward Medicine’s Next Frontier
Genetic testing has gone mainstream -- consider examples like 23andMe and even Ancestry.com, which both offer genetic analysis by mail -- and the market is on track to exceed $10 billion in the next several years.
...[PODCAST] Cofactor Genomics and the Future of Personalized Medicine
On today's podcast, Cofactor Genomics COO, Dr. David Messina discusses how his company is working to make personalized medicine a reality by focusing on the potential of RNA as a diagnostic tool.
Unlike DNA, which is set
Gila Therapeutics Completes Phase I Clinical Trial
Obesity drug developer, Gila Therapeutics, recently took a big step toward FDA approval for its new weight control treatment, completing its Phase I clinical trial in August. Gila is developing a novel intra-oral delivery of PYY, a well-known satiety hormone, to help patients reduce caloric intake and lose weight. Previous attempts to use...
Innovation Anarchy: Doctor, Please Stop, You’re Killing Me!
I learned three important lesson about innovation early in my career as an engineer at McDonnell Douglas. It was 1989 and I was assigned to work on the Navy’s F/A-18 Hornet, a carrier-based fighter jet. Originally designed in 1976, the F/A-18 was planned to remain operational through 2030 and the Navy needed enough...
iSelect Portfolio: Neuros Medical Closes $20 Million Funding Round
Neuros Medical, part of the iSelect healthcare portfolio since 2016, closed a $20 million Series AA financing round, led by U.S. Venture Partners and joined by iSelect, Boston Scientific, Aperture Venture Partners, Osage University Partners, and JumpStart, Inc.
Neuros says it plans to use the funds to complete its initial pivotal IDE clinical study,...