Stop Look And Listen: The Business of Breast Cancer And Apple HealthKit Announcement Will Create Two Million USA Jobs
Rio de Janeiro --- ( AP ) : Apple Corporation has laid out the blue print to join the Health Care Revolution. Apple along with the success of President Obama Health Care Reform ( Obama Care ) And Genomics Science 
has created a platform to create over two million United States Jobs. At its WWDC 2014 developer’s conference, Apple (AAPL) new initiative that’s generating real buzz is HealthKit, the new Apple health functionality being baked into iOS 8.
However, arch-rival Samsung (SSNLF) SAMI (Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interactions) also in San Francisco A week before Apple unveiled its own health technology ambitions with its cloud-based SAMI health platform, Simband hardware and $50 million for “accelerating digital health innovation.”
This is great news says Rose Conrad of Sam Houston Biotech as Dr. Conrad points to the Canadian National Breast Screening showing no decline in breast cancer mortality rates even from regular mammograms. Apple see’s the emergence of predictive genomics to anticipate health issues is a winner.
Source: Apple
Six months ago, health technology with smartphones was largely a question of whether to choose a Fitbit sensor or a Nike (NKE) Fuel Band. Most of us were just holding our breath for Apple’s long-anticipated iWatch. Would it pack sensors that could put those fitness trackers out of business?
The easiest way to improve the health of any given population would be to give everyone in it access to Obama care, but this is a perennial impossibility since fighting illness and death are axiomatically unprofitable. At a certain point the cost of care for an individual eclipses their earning potential and 
accrued savings, leaving providers, patients, and family members in the paradoxical position of paying increasingly costly prices for postponement of a universal end. This industry can operate at a profit only in the medium term, but Apple and its healthcare app developers are attempting to triangulate the differing currencies driving the healthcare industry, convincing its users that increased data monitoring in their lives is a healthy thing to do, while providing a new generation of data-hungry entrepreneurs raw material to build their emerging products, while further securing Apple’s centrality to every aspect of a person’s life.
The iWatch was a no-show at WWDC 2014, but AAPL actually unveiled something far more ambitious (at least in terms of health technology): Apple health products will be integrated into iOS 8, able to communicate with and store data from third-party sensors and apps and able to share that data with your doctor. Brought To You By 2014 Cadillac ELR
Conrad also points to a study presented at the 50th annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago.
“This study may change our ability to treat triple negative breast cancer patients,” says Barbara Pockaj, M.D., lead investigator of the study and Mayo Clinic surgeon. “We may have signs that these patients can be treated with immunotherapy. We don’t have a lot of options for these patients and this would really expand our options.”
Triple negative breast cancer is an aggressive form of breast cancer that evades the immune system because it lacks expression of genes for estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor and HER2. This limits treatment options. The study examined biomarkers involved in immune evasion including the gene PD-L1 and its 
association with other biological pathways as potential treatment options. In other cancers, patients who have the PD-L1 gene have been treated with immunotherapy – enhancing the body’s immune system – and some of the results have been dramatic, Dr. Pockaj says.
“This is important because immunotherapy is evolving as an effective treatment for patients with cancer,” she says. “We’ve seen remarkable results with patients with melanoma, renal cell carcinoma and even lung cancer. The question is, ‘Can we expand this type of treatment to patients with breast cancer?’”
The study analyzed 511 triple negative breast cancer samples using a multiplatform approach, including whole genome mRNA expression, protein expression, gene copy number changes and gene sequencing. The study found that 25 to 30 percent had the PD-L1 gene, which means those patients may be candidates for immunotherapy. There is a suggestion that the percentage may be even higher for patients who carry the BRCA1 gene, which produces tumor suppressor proteins. While the results need further investigation, they illustrate how molecular profiling can be used to identify potential treatment targets in triple negative breast cancer and other difficult-to-treat cancers.
“We now want to do validation studies in which we would hope to determine whether those patients who overexpress PD-L1 also have changes in their DNA repair genes,” Dr. Pockaj says. “And if they have both, it suggests the combination immunotherapy and chemotherapy may work.”
“Healthkit,” it will pull together data such as blood pressure and weight, collected by a growing plethora of healthcare apps on the iPhone or iPad, Apple executives told developers. The company will work in tandem with Nike Inc., a major player in fitness tracking, and the Mayo Clinic on the new feature, which will be included with the latest versions of Apple’s mobile software.
“That information lives in silos,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. “You can’t get a single comprehensive picture.”
Apple, which will discuss new software features with the thousands of developers gathered in San Francisco this week, did not elaborate on Healthkit’s features and capabilities.
Apple’s new HealthKit platform, according to Federighi, is a “single place that applications can contribute to a composite profile of your activity and health.” A related app, called simply Health, displays user-selected metrics in dashboard form. Both come standard with the just-unveiled iOS 8.
That’s great for the fitness nuts and quantified selfers out there, but that’s a limited market. It’s been done before. Remember Google Health? Microsoft’s HealthVault? Any of a number of untethered personal health records that have floundered on the market, in some cases for two decades, because direct-to-consumer simply doesn’t work in an industry where people expect third parties—insurance companies—to pick up the tab?
There might be a difference, however. That’s because Apple,
traditionally a consumer company, has partnered with Mayo Clinic and major electronic health records vendor Epic Systems to ensure that HealthKit can connect with organizational EHRs, and institutions will be able to intervene with patients whose readings fall out of normal range. But there’s no guarantee it will be different.
American Cancer Society and Susan G. Komen organization plus other breast cancer association investments and research funding now has the mussels to reach every American Breast Cancer Patients
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