AI Uncertainty | Moderna’s Vaccine For Kids | War Crimes Accountability

Plus: Despite $65 billion a year sleep aid market, Americans remain sleep deprived

The public has been fascinated with robot takeovers since the publication of Frankenstein in the early 1800s (the monster wasn’t technically a robot, but it was a major influence on R.U.R., the original Czech play that coined the term “robot”). And these stories got science fiction thinking about what it might be like to use robotic technology to improve our own lives. In the 1970s, Lee Majors and Lindsay Wagner got us excited about wanting to be super-powered Six Million Dollar Men and Bionic Women. But in the 1990s, Star Trek popularized the horror of becoming controlled by technology through being “assimilated” by the evil Borg. 

Now that technology is catching up to sci-fi and the era of human computer chip implants is upon us, the public is more on the side of Jean-Luc Picard than Jaime Summers when it comes to improving ourselves with technology. Only 13% of people thought computer chip implants that would allow people to process information more quickly and accurately would be a “good idea for society,” while a majority, 56%, said it would be a “bad idea,” according to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center. The remaining 31% were “not sure.” The survey polled more than 10,000 U.S. adults. The group was evenly spread on gene editing to reduce a risk of a baby developing serious health conditions, with 30% in favor, 30% against and the rest not sure. Thirty-three percent of people polled thought robotic exoskeletons with built in AI to increase strength for manual labor in the vein of Iron Man were a good idea, 24% were opposed and 42% of people were not sure. 

But there was one thing on which a majority of people agreed: the government needs to develop higher standards when it comes to evaluating these developing technologies instead of relying on existing frameworks. Though there was some division among party lines. Republicans were more likely to think the government will go too far in regulating these technologies, while Democrats were more likely to think the government wouldn’t go far enough. Another interesting takeaway is that people weren’t convinced that technology would make things better. When it comes to brain chip implants, only 24% of people thought it would lead to enhancements in people’s lives, while 42% thought it would be about the same and 31% thought it would be worse. Across all three categories, a minority of respondents thought things would get better through technology, while a majority sided with the same or worse. 

Video and photographs from the besieged port city of Mariupol in southeast Ukraine have seared images into the global consciousness of pregnant women evacuating a hospital bombed by Russian forces. Attacks on healthcare facilities, medical transport and patients are recognized as violations of international humanitarian law that has been codified in treaties and reaffirmed in U.N. resolutions that Russia itself has signed. People on the ground in Ukraine have been documenting the atrocities in real-time, which are now shared and amplified worldwide through the press, online messaging apps and social media platforms. This proliferation of information aided by technology has global human rights experts cautiously optimistic that Russia’s war in Ukraine could finally be a tipping point for holding those who commit war crimes, specifically attacks on patients and hospitals, accountable for their actions.

Deals Of The Week

Kidney Care: A three-way merger between Fresenius Health Partners, InterWell Health, and Cricket Health is creating a new chronic kidney disease management company worth $2.4 billion.  The combined company, operating under the InterWell brand, will bring together InterWell’s 1,600 nephrologists with Cricket Health’s patient engagement and technology platform and the Fresenius network of outpatient dialysis clinics. 

Fertility Tech: Alife Health, a startup using artificial intelligence to improve the in-vitro fertilization process, has raised a $22 million Series A round led by Lux Capital, Union Square Ventures and Maveron. The funding will help bring its first two products to market: an AI tool for clinicians to help retrieve mature eggs from the ovary and a patient-facing app. It is also working on an AI tool to help select embryos, which is in the investigational stage. 

Mining The Biosphere For Drugs: LifeMine, which is developing a drug discovery platform that mines biologically-originating small molecules for potential therapies, announced this morning it raised a $175 million series C round led by Fidelity. The company also announced today that it’s entered into a development agreement with GSK that includes a $70 million upfront payment in cash and investment in the series C round. 

T-Cells Against Solid Tumors: Boston-based Affinit-T Therapetuics has raised a $175 million series C round led by Vida Ventures and Leaps by Bayer. The capital will be used to accelerate development of its T-Cell therapies against solid tumor cancers caused by mutant variants of the KRAS oncogene.

Digital Therapeutics: AstraZeneca is becoming a shareholder of U.K.-based digital health company Huma in a deal valued around $30 million, as the two companies will work together to develop several software as a medical device solutions for chronic conditions and also launch decentralized clinical trials. As part of the agreement, Huma will acquire AstraZeneca’s AMAZE chronic disease management platform. 

Heart Health: Recora Health emerged from stealth this week with $20 million in funding led by SignalFire for its cardiac care management program, which aims to engage patients at home with virtual tools and access to care teams. The company is currently serving 30,000 patients through partnerships with Geisinger and regional insurance plans. 

Noteworthy

Health insurer Centene names Sarah London as CEO following the retirement of Michael Neidorff.

UnitedHealth Group has vowed to fight the Department of Justice challenge on anti-competitive grounds to its proposed $13 billion acquisition of the software and data analytics firm Change Healthcare.

Coronavirus Updates

How much does a booster dose matter? It’s been an important question over the past few months and a new study published today brings us closer to the answer. Last summer, as part of an ongoing clinical trial of Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine, 11,000 people with two doses of vaccine were roughly equally divided into a group that received a booster and a group that received a placebo. The timing of the shots was just shy of 11 months after getting a second dose of the vaccine. The results were pretty staggering - two months after the boosters were administered, right in the middle of the delta wave, only 7 boosted individuals saw a breakthrough infection compared to 110 in the placebo group. That’s about a 95% relative efficacy of a booster dose compared to the initial two doses alone, and the authors note that “the absolute vaccine efficacy of the third dose relative to a hypothetical unvaccinated population would be even higher.” 

The study also provides more evidence that vaccination is the best way to prevent severe disease. None of the booster shot recipients got severe Covid symptoms, and only two people who had two doses but only a placebo booster got severe symptoms. Neither of those two patients were hospitalized, “a finding that supported the durable protection against severe Covid-19 after the two-dose primary series of the BNT162b2 vaccine,” the authors of the study write. 

In other coronavirus news:

Former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has tested positive for Covid-19.

Understanding how omicron evades some monoclonal antibody treatments may be key to making better Covid therapies. 

Across Forbes

• War-Fueled Global Hunger Catastrophe On The Way With Solutions Tough To Come By

• Ukraine’s Engineers Battle To Keep The Internet Running While Russian Bombs Fall Around Them

• Razzlekhan: The Untold Story Of How A YouTube Rapper Became A Suspect In A $4 Billion Bitcoin Fraud

What Else We Are Reading

• New Covid trial results may point toward better ways to study medicines (Stat)

• Lessons from the COVID data wizards (Nature)

• Mexico sticking to plan to package Russian COVID-19 vaccine (Reuters)