Dynamics Shaping the Future in the “Age of the Consumer” -Forrester

Picture Credit: NASA/ GSFC (artist rendering of solar winds on Mars)

Forrester highlights the dynamics shaping the future (in 2017) of the consumer experience and the changes are coming quickly and overwhelmingly like a the solar wind shown above. Navigating the change is going to require a blend of business reassessment, idea leadership, a focus on the customer experience and intelligent application of technology to transform business. The customer-led, digital-centric market is being driven by widespread adoption of “Millennial-like” behaviors (hooray!). CRM expert Kate Leggett cites Forrester Research that 21% of US consumers are “Progressive Pioneers” that lead the demand for innovation. Cliff Condon declares that Forrester’s  Empowered Customer Segmentation shows that “more than a third all US online adults want new and engaging digital experiences. They will switch companies to find these experiences.” So this signals a tsunami…

Picture Credit: French Senate (senat.fr)

Forrester cites these examples:

• Banks try to innovate before digital banks become formidable competitors;
• Big-branded retailers confront the digital threat with store closings and amped-up omnichannel and mobile efforts;
• Manufacturers get serious about their digital business;
• Relationship-driven investment firms try to adapt to the encroachment of tech titans; and
• Utility companies launch customer experience (CX) initiatives to influence consumption habits and change their operations

IAI believes that the reinvigorated focus of businesses on the consumer is bring driven forcefully by technology firms looking to dramatically re-engineer customer engagement processes. Branding is being deeply embedded in technology data acquisition tools to customize routines but these approaches should all require customer “consent” and “opt-outs” and not collection of privacy-intrusion data. Facilitators offering end user “dashboards” should engage clients like fiduciaries and can embrace anonymized meta data collection approaches to earn client trust, creating a shared trusted advisory network (STAN). IAI believe that the concept of “propagation velocity” can be applied to STAN deployments.

Picture Credit: CORDIS European Union (cordis.europa.eu)

Forrester points out some striking trends underway:

Widespread Restructuring: One third of businesses are restructuring by devolving operational controls to brands and divisions to move closer to the customer experience, at considerable risk;

Customer-driven Matrix Structure: Replacing traditional silo-based functional relationships, these new matrices will “leverage shared functions to protect margin”;

CEO Turnover in Half of Firms: Forrester research shows a clear correlation between the quality of customer experiences and revenue growth and affirms that emotion is a core driver of customer loyalty and spending.

“Whole Brained” CMOS Needed: They must embrace both a right brain understanding of the customer experience and left brain embrace of technology and analytics. Marketing Measurement assessments by Forrester show low adoption of analytics by CMOs (Forrester Wave evaluation) ;

CIOs “Grab the Brass Ring”: B2C and B2B firms will need CIOs to lay out technology adoption strategy paths in an environment where tech budgets are forecast to grow at just 1.4%- a tall order: and

Trust is the core element: CX professionals must build client trust into every process when designing experiences that delight customers and contribute to P&L performance.

To learn more, download Forrester’s predictions guide. This guide is the front-end to 16 unique predictions that executives can use to budget, prioritize, and plan customer-obsessed strategies.

 

 

VW/Audi Management Failures – Argonne and Interoperability Centre Can Help!

Picture Credit: EU’s European Interoperability Centre

IAI believes that management failures-by-design (FbD)  [NO, not the band on YouTube here] represent “anti-innovation.” Car and Driver reported that General Motors and Toyota had their massive scandals. Now it’s Volkswagen’s turn– the owner of 70 percent of the U.S. passenger-car diesel market systematically cheated on diesel-emissions tests. From 2008-2015, VW falsified emissions reports on 11 MILLION “clean diesel” vehicles and now VW admits “emissions issues” on its Audi vehicles too (the Verge reports)!

It’s time for clean fuel vehicles with accurately reported, independent emissions testing ! The industry response is uneven, to be sure but with some meaningful progress. In contrast, ANL and IC plus a number of commercial enterprises like Tesla, GM, Ford (improving the 100 mile range Focus should be where small car production should remain in the US- more anti-innovation), Mercedes (new line!), Jaguar, and Toyota (for example) are innovating to address the challenges associated with developing improved vehicle drivetrain designs, use of new materials, employing cleaner fuels, adopting adaptive manufacturing and pioneering better processes to support our Green planet’s transition to a cleaner, more sustainable transportation future. The transport sector now accounts for about a quarter (7.3 Gt) of annual global energy-related CO2 emissions (32 Gt), yet at 3.5%, it has the lowest renewable energy usage of any major component, confirmed by the UN “Care for the Climate” report and C2ES reports that of transportation energy use by mode that 59% comes from light vehicles and 22% from trucks.

Picture Credit: C2ES

Take note, and check your biases at the door, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Shaanxi Normal University just forecasted in ScienceDirect that road transportation energy consumption in China is expected soar 50% in the five years from 2015 to 2020 ! (226,181.1 ktoe -2015 to about 347,363 ktoe-2020- twice the EU then and a third above the US and FOUR times India). The EIA, DOE Oak Ridge and the Sustainability Journal have a wealth of information available.)

With a quarter century record of over 600 collaborations, ANL appears to represent a compelling partner for transportation mobility entrepreneurs (ANL Innovation link here). DOE has finally begun to engage in cross-lab collaborations to increase innovation efficiency. An August 2016 collaboration between DOE’s Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) and Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO) and brings together DOE national laboratories and industry stakeholders to simultaneously conduct tandem fuel and engine research, development, and deployment assessments.

Argonne National Laboratory, one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s national laboratories for science and engineering research, employs 3,400 employees, including 1,400 scientists and engineers (75% doctorates). Argonne’s annual operating budget of a three-quarters of a billion dollars supports over 200 research projects. At a recent conference in Ispra, Italy, researchers discussed the “e-mobility” market, transportation electricification, and the importance of transnational vehicle, grid and system interoperability.

ANL’s Center for Transportation Research: Focused on transportation mobility, CTR operates through its system-driven research platforms, some of which are highlighted below:

Transportation Energy Analysis: automated vehicles, connectivity and sensor-based infrastructure and a;dvanced vehicle powertrain configurations;

Vehicle Systems Energy Modeling and Research: developing vehicle-level control algorithms to minimize energy consumption (ECons) and is complimented by next-generation vehicle research on ECons from environmental conditions, driver use profiles and fuels at ANL’s Advanced Powertrain Research Facility (APRF);

Picture Credit: ANL Advanced Vehicle Research

EV-Smart Grid Interoperability: engaged in Electric Vehicle (EV) standards development to ensure they are universally interoperable, reliable and simple to charge and working with the EU’s European Interoperability Center since 2013;

Engines and Fuels Optimization: relying on high-performance computing capabilities (via the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility) CTR is evaluating technologies for improved fuel efficiency; the study of renewable and alternative fuels and the characterization of engine particle emissions and catalysis;

CONTACT:  Ann Schlenker, Director, Center for Transportation Research

Phone: 630-252-5542  or   Email: aschlenker@anl.gov

As a non-footnote, but topic for a future IAI blog, Argonne just opened up the exciting I3:

Integrated Imaging Institute (2016): I3 opened recently and now “offers a broad suite of powerful imaging and data analytics capabilities to scientists, providing structural, chemical and functional information from the atomic level to the macroscale.” Argonne’s Integrated Imaging Institute (I3) seeks to build on Argonne’s position as a world leader in experimental and computational imaging science by promoting an integrated, top-down approach to scientific discovery and understanding through imaging.

 

 

 

The Internet of Things as Seen by Venture Capitalists – Massive and Inevitable

 

 

Connecting billions of objects to the Internet—a process that we call “Instrumenting The Real World”—is going to have a transformative impact on the enterprise and on society, and we’re still only in the very early stages of this change.

Martin Giles, Partner at Wing Venture Capital (San Francisco, CA)

Kudos to Martin and his team for his excellent outlook on the Internet of Things (and for generously sharing the slide deck here) and for keeping us up-to-date on the Wing blog here. Wing built a database of 2335 accelerator and venture capital funding deals for IoT startups from the start of 2013 to the end of August 2016, drawn from helpful services like Mattermark, Pitchbook and Crunchbase.

“Gaurav Garg, one of Wing’s co-founders, draws an insightful parallel between the Internet of Things and the spread of electricity to US households in the 1900s. As electrical power made its way into more and more homes, entrepreneurs set to work developing new products to take advantage of this phenomenon. But it took decades for some of the most innovative applications to appear. Many of these, from the television to the microwave, were simply impossible to conceive of in the early days of electricity. The Internet of Things is at the same stage today as electricity was in the early 1900s: we can see the potential of this new wave, but only a small fraction of things are currently connected to the internet.” Here are the key findings of Wing Capital:

Grassroots entrepreneurial activity still appears moderately healthy, though there are signs of a slowdown.

GitHub is a pretty good temperature gauge of early project activity, and the number of GitHub code repositories that have IoT as a keyword is on track to more than double this year according to publicly available data. Successfully funded IoT-related projects on Kickstarter are also set to rise again in 2016, but the pace of growth is slowing.

Industrial/Enterprise IoT accounts for the largest number of funding deals over the past few years, followed by Wearables.

The Industrial/Enterprise category came out on top (over all verticals) with almost 600 deals (stemming from) the “Factory or Industry 4.0” era, in which a combination of sensors, software and back-end cloud compute and storage is giving companies new insights into the performance of their physical assets. On the Enterprise front, we saw a reasonable amount of activity in sub-categories such as building management services, healthcare and retailing.

Picture Credit: Dell Automation

Ranked by average deal size in dollars, the Auto/Transport category comes out on top

Auto/Transport sector yielded the largest ave $/deal with an average of almost $8M a deal (yet the fewest number of deals.). Yet companies such as Tesla and Uber have inspired startups working on connected car and autonomous driving technologies, the two biggest sub-categories within the Auto/Transport field. This year has seen some big exits in the form of General Motors’ acquisition of Cruise Automation, a connected vehicles startup, and Uber’s purchase of Otto Motors, a driverless truck startup.

In the Drones category, hardware deals still dominate, but we also saw a lot of startups working on applications for aerial surveying and mapping, as well as inspection and monitoring

The Drone category is really open territory, at least in the non-military arena: hardware, drone-level innovation to optimize enterprise services (like aerial surveying and monitoring), software and analytics. 3D Robotics, pivoted towards offering drone-based services to enterprises after facing intense competition in consumer hardware from DJI, its main Chinese rival.

In 2016 four IoT categories are likely to see fewer deals than the prior year, while four others will see an increase over 2015

The number of deals in all of the high-level categories that we tracked rose every year from 2013 to 2015. This year will break that trend. Four of the categories—Industrial/Enterprise, Wearables, Home, and Robotics—will see a decline in deal activity in 2016. Meanwhile, four others—Drones, Infrastructure (which covers startups developing building blocks for the IoT, such as low-power wireless connectivity), Health and Auto/Transport—will grow again.

In terms of funding activity, the number of IoT startup deals in the sub-$2M range will decline in 2016, while the number of those in the $2M-to-$20M range and the $20M+ range will increase

The number of larger deals is expanding, which is an encouraging sign that at least some of the startups founded over the past few years have developed business models that are inspiring follow-on financings. The growth in deals above $20M is especially notable: there are likely to be five times more of these this year than in 2013.

The number of large M&A exits involving IoT businesses is set to expand again in 2016

Pitchbook (data) showed that the number of M&A deals over $200M is set to increase again in 2016, as a sign that incumbent firms who see the Internet of Things as an opportunity are willing to commit significant sums of money to acquisitions. This year has already seen some billion-dollar-plus M&A exits. Sensus, a smart meter company, was bought by Xylem for $1.7Bn, and Jasper, an IoT connectivity management platform, was acquired by Cisco for $1.4Bn.

There’s been a proliferation of IoT platforms and this outbreak of ‘Platformitis’ is likely to lead to a shakeout over time.

“Platform” deals totaled 707, or almost a third of our entire data set, with the largest number of platform deals were in the Industrial/Enterprise category, which is understandable given that customers there are looking to connect a wide variety of devices at scale. The second largest category was the home: people want the smart devices in their homes to work together seamlessly.

There have been relatively few deals for IoT-focused security startups

In our overall database of over 2300 deals, we found just 45 that were for IoT security startups. That is a surprisingly low number given all of the risks associated with connecting billions of new devices to the internet—risks that have been highlighted yet again by recent events, such as the use of IP cameras and other connected objects like home routers to launch a massive Distributed Denial of Service attack against Dyn, a domain name service provider, and another case in which hackers were able to take control of a Tesla Model S from 12 miles away.

Wing’s Peter Wagner adds, “data-first services are starting to emerge in many of the major enterprise-application categories. Companies such as Vlocity in customer relationship management (CRM), Moogsoft in IT operations and Kanjoya (now with Ultimate Software) in human resources are among startups driving the new, data-first approach.” These data-first applications are: flexible, architected on a scalable data-centric core, heavily reliant on embedded algorithms, and are iterative – creating “a virtual breeder reactor of business-process optimization and insight generation.” Wow, that’s a tech endorsement !

 

Harvard Life Lab Opening @Allston ! Congrats!

Picture Credit: Inhibiting Sclerostin May Prevent Osteoporosis- from Innovations-Report.com

On Thursday, Harvard University will open a 15,000-square-foot life science lab in Allston named after Steve Pagliuca, and executive at Bain Capital and co-owner of the Boston Celtics. The Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab will be the home to 20 startup ventures founded and run by Harvard faculty, alumni, students, and postdocs. “The fully equipped wet lab environment, collaborative co-working space, and educational resources will support high-potential biotech, pharma, and other life sciences-related ventures that have at least one Harvard founder. Teams were evaluated on a number of criteria including their science, stage of development, potential for impact, and ability to be a strong community member,” Harvard explained.

 Profile of Steve Pagliuca’s new lab – And a nice infographic on the Harvard Innovation Lab

Mayor Marty Walsh will attend the opening this Thursday at 3 p.m. at 125 Western Ave., right next to the Harvard Innovation Lab, which opened in 2011, and the Harvard Launch Lab, an incubator that opened in 2014. Other attendees include Steve and Judy Pagliuca as well as Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria and Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust. The new lab will be operated by Cambridge-based Lab Central.

The first 17 of those were revealed by the university a couple weeks ago, and they include drug and vaccine developers as well as DNA sequencing companies.

Akous – College, HBS, Blavatnik Fellow

Akouos is developing novel therapies and delivery systems to prevent hearing loss and restore hearing in genetically defined patient populations.

Aldatu Biosciences – GSAS, HSPH

Aldatu’s lead product is a low-cost HIV drug resistance genotyping test designed to guide clinical decision-making in resource-limited healthcare settings.

Beacon Genomics – HMS

Beacon Genomics is an early-stage startup company focused on enabling safe and effective therapeutic applications of genome editing nucleases by defining and optimizing genome-wide specificity.

BiomaRx – HMS

An oncology-focused startup, BiomaRX is focused on developing the first non-invasive early stage pancreatic cancer diagnostic.

change:WATER Labs, Inc. – College

change:WATER Labs is developing solutions to drastically minimize the increasing volumes of off-grid residential, commercial and industrial wastewater, leveraging a super-hydrophilic polymer that passively eliminates 85-99% of waste volumes onsite. Our first product will be a portable, evaporative toilet for homes with no power or plumbing, specifically in refugee camps and low-income communities in developing countries.

DayZero Diagnostics – GSAS

DayZero is developing a rapid diagnostic for identifying drug-resistant pathogens in clinical samples. It uses next-generation genome sequencing and data-driven algorithms to rapidly identify pathogen species and predict drug resistance, in hours rather than in days (the current culture-based standard), so physicians can quickly prescribe the most effective antibiotic.

Gel4Med – SEAS

Gel4Med is focused on improving the outcomes in regenerative medicine through the design and engineering of smart biomaterials that instruct and harness the innate capacity of the body to heal.

GRO Biosciences (GRObio) – Wyss Institute/HMS

Using our microbes with an expanded genetic code, GRO Biosciences makes therapeutic proteins with new stabilizing bonds to enable inexpensive microbial fermentation, fast production times, and long serum half-life.

Nix – HBS, SEAS, Blavatnik Fellow

Nix is developing a single-use consumer diagnostic platform that ad¬dresses the white space between the biosensor market and activity trackers, with an initial focus on hydration for athletes, soldiers, and laborers.

PathoVax – HMS

PathoVax is transforming the multi-billion HPV vaccine market with RGVax to target all cancer-causing HPVs neglected by current offerings.

Piper Therapeutics – College, HBS

Piper Therapeutics is focused on using small molecules to modify immune system signaling, preventing tumors from acquiring macrophages.

Riparian Pharmaceuticals – College, SEAS

Riparian is discovering therapeutics to promote vascular health and treat the leading causes of human mortality. Its unique approach of modulating biology within the blood vessel wall aims to add a new therapeutic dimension to cardiovascular, diabetic, and kidney diseases.

Suono Bio – HMS

Suono Bio is developing technology that enables ultra-rapid delivery of therapeutics across biologic tissues, such as the gastrointestinal (GI) tract.

UnNamed – HMS

UnNamed’s technologies enable living cells to sense and respond to chemicals. This is done by engineering proteins to become dependent on binding to a target molecule, allowing for the generation of novel biosensors that can be used for optimizing bioproduction of useful chemicals, environmental toxin detection, or drug discovery.

UrSure Inc. – HKS

An HIV prevention company, UrSure Inc. boosts boost adherence to the HIV preventive medication, PrEP, by making patient and physician friendly urine tests that allow doctors to monitor patient compliance to the medication.

Vaxess Technologies, Inc.  HBS, SEAS, HKS, HLS

Vaxess is using silk to create the next generation of vaccines that combine high temperature stability with novel delivery formats such as oral films and sustained release microneedles.

XGenomes – HMS

XGenomes is developing groundbreaking DNA sequencing technologies, with the goal of accelerating the path towards personalized medicine

Open Borders Policy Leading to an Infectious Disease Crisis in the West

The ongoing humanitarian crisis stoked by ongoing wars across the Middle East is leading to a significant number of second-order consequences, where the intense conduct of war and planned forced migration are resulting in societal disaster. These indirect, negative outcomes were brilliantly profiled in a 1969 American Academy of Arts & Sciences treatise written by Professor Raymond Bauer and team who warned about these often unwanted but “acceptable outcomes.” The reality of the crisis is chilling in humanitarian, health and civil society disruption aspects. Professor Catherine Lutz from the Watson Institute’s “Cost of War” Project at Brown University places the cost at a staggering $13 trillion!

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees reports there are an estimated 21.3 million refugees worldwide as a subset of over 61 milllion forceably displaced persons. An investigation of the National Institutes of Health MEDLINE database yields almost 2400 scholarly articles about “refugee diseases.” Communities worldwide are being torn up by the burdens placed on them from a surge of refugees from Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Afghanistan which correspond not surprisingly to active prosecuted “humanitarian” wars justified by the “responsibility to protect (R2P)” policy at the U.S. State Department and United Nations. As a result, the European Union now suffers from almost a thousand ‘no-go’ areas because of migrants, forcing (for one example) Germans to flee their own country. Data from the German statistics agency, Destatis, shows that 138,000 Germans left Germany in 2015, and the Gatestone Institute details a virtual flight of an estimated quarter million fleeing this year from Chancellor Merkel’s imposition of one million refugees this year alone.

In the U.S., not surprisingly, the refugee crisis was turned into a big business by the Obama Administration in prostitution of many religious institutions, systemic threats to public health, violation of state and local community governance rights, subordination of citizen rights by outside agitators, and ALL at taxpayer expense. Breitbart reports that, “in FY 2015, the State Department, through the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, spent more than $1 billion on these programs, which settled international refugees “vetted” by the United Nations High Commission on International Refugees. Much of this $1 billion in annual revenue goes to voluntary agencies (VOLAGs), several of which are Christian non-profits, such as Catholic Charities, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, World Relief Corporation, Church World Service, and Domestic and Foreign Missionary Service of the Episcopal Church of the USA. (also referred to as Episcopal Migration Ministries), who are (now U.S. Government contractors).” After four months, these VOLAGs are not required to provide even refugee location data to immigration authorities.  Pricenomics counts over 700,000 refugees brought into the U.S. during the Obama Administrations plus another 100,000 surge in the each of the last two years. Professor Lawrence Brown of Ohio State University also details how these populations do not integrate but cluster due to “secondary migration” and encourage illegal immigration by family not counted in the official State Department statistics.

Resources exceeding $5 trillion have been spent on Middle East wars during the last seven years and the Obama Administration now focuses less on job creation for its own citizens than providing a broad range of public services to refugees in a summer 2016 “Call to Action” and a subsequent “Partnership for Refugees” run by, you guessed it, the State Department to promote “education, employment and enablement”. What about these for U.S. citizens???

And, more worrisome than ethnic disengagement, non-assimilation into communities, and violation of U.S. immigration laws (as also documented in Germany), are two immediate second order consequences. The stated loyalties of some refugees to ISIS pose national security risks and many of them impose public health burdens and systemic health risks on the legal U.S. citizen population. In the largest public opinion survey in Arab lands conducted in November 2015, the Doha Institute found one third of Syrian refugees were sympathetic to the terrorist group, ISIS.

Picture Credit: Leishmanaisis Life Cycle

The most important American refugee “policy” failure lies in long term systemic health risks to citizens from reintroducing diseases that had been eradicated in the West decades earlier – many are now drug resistant. The travesty stems, in part, from the failure of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, tasked with five critical missions, to follow the advice of its internal experts who have warned repeatedly of the threat to the U.S. population from infectious diseases being transmitted by refugees entering the country. Unlike legal immigrants who comply with the official process, these “war-torn” refugees (NOT just from Syria but many from Africa and almost all muslim) are not screened nor quarantined!

CDC touts, “As a world leader in health promotion and disease prevention, CDC works with immigrant, refugee, and migrant groups to improve their health by:

• providing guidelines for disease screening and treatment in the United States and overseas
• tracking and reporting disease in these populations
• responding to disease outbreaks in the United States and overseas
• advising U.S. partners on health care for refugee groups
• educating and communicating with immigrant and refugee groups and partners.”

More than a dozen new diseases have been reintroduced into the U.S. and the West overall from the refugee crisis, many now amplified by multi-drug resistance (MDR):

1) flesh eating Leishmaniasis, 2) Tuberculosis, 3) Measles (MMR), 4) Whooping Cough, 5) HIV/ AIDS, 6) Scarlet Fever, 7) Polio, 8) Hepatitis, 9) Bubonic Plague, 10) multi-drug resistant organisms, 11) foot & mouth disease, 12) Diptheria, and 13) Brucellosis.

As an illustration of clear mission failure, a team from the CDC’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine detailed in the authoritative BMC Public Health in December 2015 that failures of screening and treatment of refugees for latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) leads to extensive public health system costs and secondary infections. Moreover, Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, has consistently criticized the CDC for allowing refugees to enter the United States without screening and treatment for latent tuberculosis. “If for humanitarian reasons we wish to help people fleeing persecution, there is still no need to release them into the general population of susceptible individuals. Officials who place politics above the health of Americans need to be held accountable and removed from positions of authority,” Orient says. Some public health officials blame “prejudice” on the reaction to these disease infiltrations and demand more resources from the healthy population but others deliver the data.

Picture Credit: United Nations “New Urban Agenda”

In this election, one candidate calls for enforcement of U.S. immigration laws, screening and quarantine of refugees, expulsion of illegal aliens with criminal records, and State Department enforcement of existing treaties that legally require deportation of criminals to their home countries. The other calls for a dramatic six-fold escalation of the flood of illegal aliens with full benefits and other political inducements granting citizenship rights without any proof of language functionality, national loyalty or adequate documentation or origin- while admitting the threat of allowing jihadis into the U.S.! After reviewing Clinton’s “Breaking Every Barrier Agenda” plan on her website, the Center for Immigration Studies’s Steve Camarota projected that her plan will add 10 million new immigrants to the U.S. during her first term alone — in addition to the 11 million illegal immigrants to whom Clinton said she plans to grant amnesty within her first 100 days in office. This “plan” aligns with the United Nations “New Urban Agenda” plan that mandates unlimited migration across national borders.

Even the FBI and Department of Homeland Security admit that the refugee “vetting” process in flawed and inadequate. Why should American citizens sit back and consent to economic warfare from within? Late last year, even CNN reported that two thirds of U.S. states did not want refugees but the Obama administration ignores the will of its citizens.

Is DNA Storage Going to Lead to Mind Implantation?

Picture credit: NHGRI- https://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/

Last fall, IAI spent a term at the Harvard Graduate Extension School studying bioinformatics which is a cross-disciplinary area uniting computational biology and large scale data analysis. The revolution in applying computational power to biology accelerated with the Human Genome Project when the cost of sequencing the human genome was $1 billion but today, it costs just over a thousand dollars to sequence an entire genome, which is approximately three billion letters, and the price will continue to drop as the technology advances. The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) supports the databases that contain trillions of sequences.  A genome consists of all of the DNA contained in a cell’s nucleus. DNA is composed of four chemical building blocks or “bases” (for simplicity, abbreviated G, A, T, and C), with the biological information encoded within DNA determined by the order of those bases. Diploid organisms, like humans and all other mammals, contain duplicate copies of almost all of their DNA (i.e., pairs of chromosomes; with one chromosome of each pair inherited from each parent).

Andy Extance at Nature chronicled how this DNA storage race spring from cocktail napkins in 2011 to monthly breakthroughs this past summer. At the European Bioinformation Institute, a brainstorming session at a Hamburg Germany conference in February 2011 focused on how to afford to store the reams of genome sequences and other data the world was throwing at these engineers. The lead researcher and “his EBI colleague Ewan Birney took the idea back to their labs, and two years later announced that they had successfully used DNA to encode five files, including Shakespeare’s sonnets and a snippet of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech¹. By then, biologist George Church and his team at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had unveiled an independent demonstration of DNA encoding². But at 739 kilobytes (kB), the EBI files comprised the largest DNA archive ever produced — until July 2016, when researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington claimed a leap to 200 megabytes (MB).” The MIT Technology Review applauded the breakthrough here.

Microsoft is touting its capabilities in this area -but its program is very dependent upon a University of Washington computer science lab and some early stage partners. Pre-IPO firm Twist Bioscience lays out the case for finding an alternative to the magnetic data storage dilemma (and it is a Microsoft partner):

Most of the world’s data is stored using media that won’t last for more than several decades, even in the optimal conditions of freezing temperatures and total darkness [1]. One study showed that data on a hard drive running for four years shows an attrition rate of 22%—hardly stellar performance. Meanwhile, the amount of digital data in the world is doubling every two years, and our ability to store all that data is not keeping pace. According to a recent study by EMC, by 2020 we will only be able to store 15% of our digital data, whereas in 2013 we could store 33%.

The ability to encode digital information in strands of DNA is a major advancement in archival technology because DNA molecules are not susceptible to the most dire limitations of traditional digital storage media: limited lifespan, permanent/standard format and low data density. There is enormous enthusiasm among venture capital funds about DNA storage and the money is flowing into emerging memory technologies, DNA storage and computing, hardware accelerators for machine learning, and system software for new architectures.

Picture credit: MSFT / University of Washington

IDC predicts that the worldwide total of stored digital data will hit 16 trillion gigabytes next year, most of it housed in huge data centers. The University of Washington’s Strauss estimates that a shoebox worth of DNA could hold the equivalent of roughly 100 giant data centers.

Well, for MSFT, it’s all about the possibilities   – ah, yes, the ultimate operating system: can’t disconnect, price is your life, they get paid for the feeds, and you cannot refuse automatic system “upgrades”, even if they are as bad as Windows 10 ! IAI worries that these DNA Storage advances will not be equally shared among the population and that there could be people like Ray Kurzweil who implant new memories into their brain as their bodies survive as vessels on pig-grown replacement parts. For me, I believe in the sanctity of the soul…

Picture Credit: TodayIAmBlessed.com

Trio wins Nobel chemistry prize for ‘world’s smallest machines’

Picture Credit: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk
A trio of European scientists has won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing molecular machines that could one day be injected to fight cancer or used to make new types of materials and energy storage devices. These machines are molecules with tiny movable parts that move in controlled ways and are a thousand times thinner than a strand of hair. Scientists have dreamed of creating machines at such a small scale for decades. Notably, physicist Richard Feynman, himself a Nobel laureate, imagined the possibility of these creations in a key lecture back in 1959.  The Nobel announcement is posted here.

Such molecular machines can be developed in smart medicines that seek out disease or damage and deliver drugs to fight or fix it, and in smart materials that can adapt in response to external triggers such as changes in light or temperature. “There are endless opportunities,” Feringa, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, told reporters when asked to predict what his work could eventually be used for. “Think of a tiny micro-robot that a doctor in the future will inject into your blood and that goes to search for a cancer cell or goes to deliver a drug, for instance.”

First, in 1983 Dr. Sauvage and colleagues managed to forge two rings of carbon atoms into an interlocked pair, like a links in a chain, called a catenane. Then, in 1991, while at the University of Birmingham, Dr. Stoddard revealed how to make rotaxane, a structure that involved a ring of atoms that can rotate freely around an axle. Finally, in 1999, Dr. Feringa developed the first molecular motor. The Verge has a great article on the mechanism for these interactions including the template for nano-computer chips that are activated by heat.

Dr. Feringa said that the science of molecular machines is still in its infancy but would ultimately lead to many applications in health, materials and energy systems. “They have really mastered motion control at the molecular scale,” said Olof Ramström, a member of the selection committee, during Wednesday’s prize announcement at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.

 

The Race to Establish a Cancer Detection “Liquid Biopsy” Market

   Picture Source: Medical News Today

Cancer is big business in the U.S. and globally, increasingly, as the food and water supply gets poisoned. It starts with a tumor, which is an abnormal mass of tissue or neoplasm which is solid or fluid-filled. Whereas benign tumors don’t spread, cancerous or malignant ones do – spreading rapidly by metastisis.

Medical News Today profiles different types of tumors, which are made up of specific types of cancer cells:

• Carcinoma – these tumors are derived from the skin or tissues that line body organs (epithelial cells). Carcinomas can be, for example, of the stomach, prostate, pancreas, lung, liver, colon or breast. Many of the most common tumors are of this type, especially among older patients.
• Sarcoma – these are tumors that start off in connective tissue, such as cartilage, bones, fat and nerves. They originate in the mesenchymal cells outside the bone marrow. The majority of sarcoma tumors are malignant. They are called after the cell, tissue or structure they arise from, for example fibrosarcoma, liposarcoma, angiosarcoma, chondrosarcoma, and osteosarcoma.
• Lymphoma/Leukemia – cancer arises from the blood forming (hematopoietic) cells that originate in the marrow and generally mature in the blood or lymph nodes. Leukemia accounts for 30% of childhood cancers. Leukemia is thought to be the only cancer where tumors are not formed.
• Germ cell tumor – these are tumors that arise from a germ cell, pluripotent cells (cells than can turn into any kind of cell). Germ cell tumors most commonly present in the ovary (dysgerminoma) or testicle (seminoma). The majority of testicular tumors are germ cell ones. Less commonly, germ cell tumors may also appear in the brain, abdomen or chest.
• Blastoma – tumors derived from embryonic tissue or immature “precursor” cells. These types of tumors are more common in children than adults. Blastoma is often the root word used in longer ones that describe tumors, for example, medulloblastoma and glioblastoma are kinds of brain tumors, retinoblastoma is a tumor in the retina of the eye, osteoblastoma is a type of bone tumor, while a neuroblastoma is a tumor found in children of neural origin.

The evidence of a sharp rise in cancer incidence globally is staggering and documented by the World Health Organization (WHO) in their Global Cancer Observatory here:

In 2012, worldwide, there were 14.1 million new cancer cases, 8.2 million cancer deaths, and 32.6 million people living with cancer within 5 years of diagnosis; 57% (8 million) of those new cancer cases, 65% (5.3 million) of the cancer deaths, and 48% (15.6 million) of the 5-year prevalent cancer cases occurred in the less developed regions. In 2014, the WHO’s Cancer Report predicted a 57% rise in cancer incidence over 20 years.

 

 

The National Cancer Institute defines a solid cancer tumor as:

An abnormal mass of tissue that usually does not contain cysts or liquid areas. Solid tumors may be benign (not cancer), or malignant (cancer). Different types of solid tumors are named for the type of cells that form them. Examples of solid tumors are sarcomas, carcinomas, and lymphomas. Leukemias (cancers of the blood) generally do not form solid tumors. Doctors and patients depend on accurate information derived from diagnostic tools, such as clinical laboratory tests, imaging studies, and genomic analysis, to make decisions at all stages of cancer care. Omics tests include those based on such disciplines as genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, which is the study of small-molecule metabolites in cells and tissues that are present in bodily fluids, such as blood and urine.

Scientists are aware that fragments of cancer cells that die are detectable in the blood as various cancers (especially breast and prostate) are rapid replicators and many spread from one organ to another in a process called metastasis. In addition, there is substantial research to suggest that cancers have their own stem cells. Another approach taken by Stanford has been to identify tumor DNA in the bloodstream led by Maximilian Diehn, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of radiation oncology and the CRK Faculty Scholar, and his team. The researchers termed their new, two-pronged approach “integrated digital error suppression,” or iDES which involves “bar coding” DNA strands before amplification. IDES builds upon a method called CAPP-Seq that Alizadeh, Diehn and Newman previously devised to capture very small amounts of tumor DNA from the blood by looking for a panel of mutations known to be associated with a particular cancer.

While there are a number of venture capital funded cancer detection firms, there is battle for an emerging cancer screening by bringing a “liquid biopsy” to market.  The promise here is to sharply cut the cost of tissue biopsy, promote earlier cancer detection, and take a less invasive approach to patient care. When the liquid biopsy tests identified key genes known to drive cancer growth, such as BRAF, KRAS, EGFR, ALK, RET and ROS1, those same mutations were also present in 94 percent to 100 percent of the tissue samples from these same patients. The leading horse in this battle is the genomics equipment supplier Illumina, which has decided to “spin out” Grail – a subsidiary it controls but has new investors including (Jeff) Bezos Expeditions, Bill Gates, Sutter Hill Ventures and Arch Capital Partners. GRAIL CEO Jay Flatley explained in GEN, “GRAIL’s promise is to revolutionize screening across all cancer types, using the sensitivity and specificity of next-generation sequencing to create a molecular stethoscope that measures the ultimate cancer biomarker. ”The more sensitive the test, Flatley said, the larger the potential market for it. That market, he said, could be as large as $20 billion to $40 billion if ctDNA could detect stage 2 across a broad range of cancers—but could grow to more than $100 billion if the tests can detect stage 1 as well as determine tissue of origin. Illumina is aiming to provide a $1000 genome sequencing for patients in 2017 when large scale ctDNA trials are expected to be launched. Three other dark horses to watch are ITUS, Guardant Health  and Pathway Genomics.