Apple Is Buying A $Billion Dollars Worth Of Their Stock Back Want To Know Why

Barron’s Medical Journal Reporting from UCLA Medical Center Los Angeles USA

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Apple Is Buying A $Billion Dollars Worth Of Their Stock Back Want To Know Why

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Several major technology companies have entered in to the Health Care Arena. Leading the way is Apple Inc, Google and several Biotech companies. Genomics Is hot says Rose Conrad CEO of Sam Houston Biotech.

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In a landmark move that will help to realize the promise of personalized medicine, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)announced the first regulatory clearance of a high-throughput DNA sequencing device. This action reflects our nation’s commitment to a future in which health-care professionals will be able to use each person’s unique genetic information to provide more precise ways of detecting, treating, and preventing disease.

Specifically, the FDA authorized broad clinical use of Illumina MiSeq Dx, a sophisticated DNA sequencing system that traces its roots back to NIH-funded science and that, until now, has only been used for research. I commend the FDA not only for the immediate impact of its decision, but for the pathway it has created for the clearance of future devices that may Brought To You By Houston Ballet ALADDIN (AMERICAN PREMIERE)incorporate further improvements in sequencing technology and cost effectiveness.

Sam Houston Breast Cancer Researchers and Scientist are ahead of the curve with several new technologies based on Nanoparticles and Semi Conductors Namely Genomics and treatments.

The field of genomics is caught in a data deluge. Targeted breast cancer DNA sequencing is becoming faster and cheaper at a pace far outstripping Moore’s law, which describes the rate at which computing gets faster and cheaper.

The result is that the ability to determine Targeted breast cancer DNA sequences is starting to outrun the ability of researchers to store, transmit and especially to analyze the data.

The cost of sequencing a human genome — all three billion bases of DNA in a set of human chromosomes — plunged to $10,000.00 which means genomics breast cancer DNA sequencing is around $3000.00.

The lower cost, along with increasing speed, has led to a huge increase in how much breast Cancer sequencing data is being produced.

The availability of high-throughput DNA sequencers will enable physicians to take a comprehensive look at a patient’s genetic blueprint, or genome, to search for a wide range of variations or changes that increase risk of disease, drive the disease process, and/or affect response to medications and other treatments. Such information has the potential to benefit patients in many ways. For example, an oncologist might use results of a sequencing scan to choose the chemotherapy drug that is most likely to work.

As exciting as it may be, today’s action really is just the beginning. We still need to establish the clinical validity of new genomic findings before they are used to make medical decisions. We also need to work hard to ensure that physicians and other health-care professionals have the tools they need to use genomic information well. So, while we may have taken one important stride today down the path towards personalized medicine, we must take many more if we are to achieve its full potential for improving human health.

Gilead Sciences is an American biotechnology company that discovers, develops and commercializes therapeutic. Alexion Pharmaceuticals is the original developer and distributor of Soliris, a drug used in treating the rare disorders Hemolytic-uremic syndrome and Paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria.

A group of senior Apple executives met with directors at the United States Food and Drug Administration in December to discuss mobile medical applications, according to the F.D.A.’s public calendars that list participants of meetings. Among the participants from Apple were Jeff Williams, senior vice president of operations; Bud Tribble, vice president of software technology at Apple; Michael O’Reilly, who joined Apple last year; and an employee from Apple’s government affairs department.

On the F.D.A. side of the table were Jeff Shuren, the director of the agency’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, and Bakul Patel, who drafted the F.D.A.’s mobile medical app guidance and is astaunch advocate for patient safety when it comes to apps and medical gadgets.

Mark A. McAndrew, a partner with the law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister, which works with health and science clients, first noticed the F.D.A. meeting while browsing the public calendars.

He said in a phone interview that given the prominence of the people in the meeting from both the government and Apple side, these were not your run-of-the-mill conversations.

“They are either trying to get the lay of the land for regulatory pathways with medical devices and apps and this was an initial meeting,” Mr. McAndrew said, “or Apple has been trying to push something through the F.D.A. for a while and they’ve had hangups.” Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, declined to comment. Affordable Care Act will produce millions of newly insured Americans, many of whom will be making decisions about health care for the first time. A host of software startups plans to court the newly insured with slick online tools geared toward simple management of personal health.

"We've spent the last six years of our lives preparing for this," says Cyrus Massoumi, who co-founded ZocDoc Inc., a Yelp-like search engine for physicians, in 2007. "We're going to have a spike." Beyond counting on the program to supply new demand, many of these companies have borrowed designs and functions from social-networking and consumer apps. For example, online services from Audax Health Inc. encourage consumers to win cash rewards from insurance providers as they improve their health with diet and exercise and collect Foursquare-style badges to prove it.

Dozens of Internet start-ups are competing to build marquee brand names in a booming market for wellness apps. "You'll probably see dozens of very successful consumer-branded companies" in online health, says John Sculley, the onetime Apple Inc.AAPL -1.04% CEO who is an investor in Audax. ZocDoc's Mr. Massoumi and other health-care entrepreneurs are betting that, given the power to pick their own plans, consumers will gravitate to the online services that are the easiest and most fun to use. To help build the cool stuff, the startups have poached hundreds of engineers from other Silicon Valley companies and loaded up on investors to keep driving growth. ZocDoc has raised almost $100 million from Khosla Ventures and other venture firms; Audax took in $55 million over the past three years, mainly from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida and other insurers.

Venture capitalists have invested $948 million in 144 health-tech companies in the first nine months of this year, 16% more than was invested in all of 2012, according to the National Venture Capital Association. The firms include startups with a new take on medical records, such as Practice Fusion Inc.; online-therapist services like Breakthrough Behavioral Inc.; activity trackers like Fitbit Inc.; and Glow, a fertility app created by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin.