Scientific MOOCs follower. Author of Airpocalypse, a techno-medical thriller (Out Summer 2017)


Welcome to the digital era of biology (and to this modest blog I started in early 2005).

To cure many diseases, like cancer or cystic fibrosis, we will need to target genes (mutations, for ex.), not organs! I am convinced that the future of replacement medicine (organ transplant) is genomics (the science of the human genome). In 10 years we will be replacing (modifying) genes; not organs!


Anticipating the $100 genome era and the P4™ medicine revolution. P4 Medicine (Predictive, Personalized, Preventive, & Participatory): Catalyzing a Revolution from Reactive to Proactive Medicine.


I am an early adopter of scientific MOOCs. I've earned myself four MIT digital diplomas: 7.00x, 7.28x1, 7.28.x2 and 7QBWx. Instructor of 7.00x: Eric Lander PhD.

Upcoming books: Airpocalypse, a medical thriller (action taking place in Beijing) 2017; Jesus CRISPR Superstar, a sci-fi -- French title: La Passion du CRISPR (2018).

I love Genomics. Would you rather donate your data, or... your vital organs? Imagine all the people sharing their data...

Audio files on this blog are Windows files ; if you have a Mac, you might want to use VLC (http://www.videolan.org) to read them.

Concernant les fichiers son ou audio (audio files) sur ce blog : ce sont des fichiers Windows ; pour les lire sur Mac, il faut les ouvrir avec VLC (http://www.videolan.org).


"I'd want to see IBM Watson + Google Glass, Now talk about Healthcare Disruption!"




J. Craig Venter: "13 years ago my team published the first human genome in the journal science. A new beginning for medicine will soon be announced."

16 yo -> DNA discovery of her rare cancer

Gene Sequencing Projects at the French BioBeach (Irvine, San Diego, CA)

French BioBeach group on LinkedIn

Coriell Life Sciences Prepares for the Whole-Genome Health Environment

Nice one from Coriell Life Sciences CEO: "We want Watson to be the kind of gatekeeper for what’s happening in the medial field and really supercharge our whole process." Watson & DTC genomic medicine? Can't wait!
http://www.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/blog/health-care/2014/02/ibm-supercomputer-watsons-new-gig.html?ana=twt


3d PRINTED LIVER EXPECTED IN 2014

"This Woman Invented a Way to Run 30 Lab Tests on Only One Drop of Blood."

Elizabeth Holmes: the Steve Jobs of digital medicine?

"Researchers hijack cancer migration mechanism to ‘move’ brain tumors."

Laurent Alexandre sur BFM : Google, l'intelligence artificielle et la théorie de la technophobie gauloise

On ne pouvait pas mieux dire.. Bravo Laurent Alexandre !

How to Get a Job at Google

"Multiple new studies on cell-free, plasma tumor DNA; CRISPR Madness, In-Person vs Virtual Office Visits."

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/821060_1
Whatsapp in Medicine?

"3-D printer creates transformative device for heart treatment."

http://www.rdmag.com/news/2014/02/3-d-printer-creates-transformative-device-heart-treatment

Pomplamoose: on the artist business plan

Watched these videos with great interest yesterday... very informative... Great artists, great music, great voice... What's not to like? Thank you, Pomplamoose! We LOVE who you are and what you do!









This Blog Post is for my husband :-)

You can now watch the Personalized Medicine World Conf talks online

Eric Topol MD: "Progress in medicine is now happening so fast it can't be accurately graphed!"


"HIPAA is conveniently intentionally misunderstood & misused by the medical establishment."

China: "The Desolation of Smaug"

Interested in Genomics and Next-Gen Sequencing? Here's who you should follow on Twitter

Biologie de synthèse : vers une industrialisation du vivant ?

Débouchés intéressants pour les étudiants de l'école "42 Born To Code" à Paris...

Nanoparticles to diagnose cancer or blood clots via urine

"GoogleGlass and other Marvels/future amazing feats in technology."



"Two thirds of patients who check their medical records find errors but providers don't have process to correct."

"WTF? : Hospital records of all NHS [UK] patients sold to insurers."

Cancer clinical trials reinvented

For the first time ever, neuroscientists have completed a roadmap of the top-trafficked "highways" in the brain!

The Art of Innovation presented at TEDx Berkeley

"Whole-genome haplotyping using long reads and statistical methods."

"The rapid growth of sequencing technologies has greatly contributed to our understanding of human genetics. Yet, despite this growth, mainstream technologies have not been fully able to resolve the diploid nature of the human genome. Here we describe statistically aided, long-read haplotyping (SLRH), a rapid, accurate method that uses a statistical algorithm to take advantage of the partially phased information contained in long genomic fragments analyzed by short-read sequencing. For a human sample, as little as 30 Gbp of additional sequencing data are needed to phase genotypes identified by 50× coverage whole-genome sequencing. Using SLRH, we phase 99% of single-nucleotide variants in three human genomes into long haplotype blocks 0.2–1 Mbp in length. We apply our method to determine allele-specific methylation patterns in a human genome and identify hundreds of differentially methylated regions that were previously unknown. SLRH should facilitate population-scale haplotyping of human genomes."

"The long overdue price-transparency movement in health care is starting to rock."

"Creative destruction will drive disruptive innovation to make health care a positive economic driver...not a cost."

Son of leg amputee patient: healthcare system works in silos where it should work across the silo

Amputated patient is trying to engage emergency care in digital age (or will die trying)

AUDIO VERSION (download audio file). This is a success story: listen to how a leg amputated patient is engaging emergency care in digital age!

Audio files on this blog are Windows files ; if you have a Mac, you might want to use VLC (http://www.videolan.org) to read them. 


Son of leg amputee patient: healthcare system works in silos where it should work across the silo: (video in French)


Nicolas from Jean Michel Billaut on Vimeo.

About four years ago, my friend, a French digital economist (actually one of the top social media influencers in his country), felt a violent and sudden pain in his knee and the back of his leg, as he was playing with his three-year old grandson. Turns out it was his popliteal artery that was ailing. My friend had been experiencing what you might call the equivalent of a cerebrovascular accident, but instead of happening in his brain, the bad news was happening at the back of his left leg.

His son, a physician, calls 911 – or rather, the French equivalent of 911, as this is all happening in France. The son happens to work at the exact same place where the father lives. How convenient and ideal for an emergent patient! Optimal reaction time, as you might say. Excellent! Except that no ambulance was sent, in spite of the accurate description of popliteal aneurysm symptoms made by his son on the phone. Yes, you hear me, on the phone. I know, this is digital age, but guess what? (Non-) emergent patients are being triaged… on the phone. The whole thing seems to run by fortuneteller rather than by scientific standards, if you want my opinion…Anyway, the person operating the triage system in this particular circumstance did not deem it necessary to require an ambulance, so much for optimal reaction time and care. When finally the ambulance came, they were not sure exactly where to go so they just drove my friend around, see if they could find some available OR, and some available surgeon, vascular surgical specialty. 

"Sorry, that OR is not equipped for vascular surgery," "- oh ok, I see, well, we’ll try some other place then," and so on and so forth. 
Four hours later – and this is happening near Paris, mind you, not in the middle of nowhere! – my friend finally sees a surgeon… said surgeon wears a frown: “Not sure you can keep your leg… It looks bad… You should have come earlier…”
I kid you not.

Guess what happened next? My friend had to undergo several painful surgical procedures AND vascular surgeon could not avoid leg amputation. They could not save my friend's limb. Pay AND suffer.

The saddest thing of all is that this is only the beginning of the nightmare… I’ve been listening to him telling his story on various occasions in the course of the past few years and months and each time he sounded like whenever he was trying to explain his situation to medical and admin staff, he got "put in his place". A few days ago, he told his story on his blog, using real names and wrote about conversations that actually took place – but he ended up receiving threat phone calls: "We’ll harm your family if you don’t take this off your blog." That kind of thing.

He pressed charges (delayed treatment) and lost the trial. Dismissed case.

The point he wants to make? Our healthcare system works in silos where it should work across the silo. How about using telemedicine for patient triage?

"72% of Consumers Are Willing to See a Doctor Via Telehealth Video Conferencing in the US."(just about the same in France, I would guess)...

Now, how about some smartphone app that would signal which OR is available, in which surgical specialty, so that ambulances don’t have to drive a patient around for hours, trying to guess where they should drop him… Is emergency care bound to be like a shot in the dark – in digital age, when we have a 'killer app' for just about anything? Anything but health? How ironic!
Yet in the course of four years, we saw a lot of engineers, they offered their eager and friendly and expert help and advice to make appropriate apps and promote telemedicine. Now I'm thinking back at all the efforts we have deployed, and looking back at all the meetings we’ve held… but to little avail. We could have saved time. We could have saved energy. Why? Because, you know what? 

It is not in the best interest of those occupying a privileged or strategic position to listen to my friend and his embarrassing futuristic technological mood.


Click on the pic to view it full size

Whenever I listen to what my internet and futuristic minded friend has to say about digital economy in general and its disruptive aspects in particular, though, the "futuristic-technological-mood" thing just makes perfect sense!


FUTURE 2.0? Generations, myths, beliefs, religions, philosophies, technology and its use, added value and its distribution... by Homo Sapiens.

This presentation has been held at the Paris offices of  L'Oreal, in April 2012. It explains major shifts of paradigm happening right here and right now in medicine, business, economy, communication. Genomics and digital care combine for healthcare ... The global digital economy is getting in gear, reorganizing our entire economic system ... Open source technologies, wireless medicine, robotics ... Let's take a look at the facts ... How to survive and thrive?  Be on the lookout for information, as "the general who wins a battle is the best informed" (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War").

What happened to my friend could happen to me, it could happen to you, in fact it could happen to just anybody. Forget about France. Forget about the U.S. Because it's just the same story. Medicine is sick. How can we heal it? We don’t need lonesome cowboys, we need pit crews. Now saying this is as disruptive as it gets. Will surgeons let the patients hold the scalpel? I, for one, know the answer.








OptimizeMe, a Lifelogging App Interpreting the Quantified Self Data, Launches in the Apple App Store


"All science education will include the study of communication skills."

The Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF), the world’s largest international pre-college science competition.

"A creepy new startup wants to create living avatars for dead people."

"There is a new approach being tried that kills leukemia using a patient's own immune system."

"UCSF team transforms skin cells into mature liver cells."

Eric Topol MD: "What do you think of 'add-appters' as the hardware adds for smartphone medical apps?"

Oh, and by the way, here's the recommendation I wrote today on Eric Topol MD's LinkedIn Page:

"2029: The Year When Robots Will Have The Power To Outsmart Their Makers."

"IBM Solar Collector Magnifies Sun By 2000X – These Could Provide Power To The Entire Planet."

Is genetic testing humans playing God?

Ray Kurzweil in a Google Science Fair 2014 Hangout On Air

Will watch...

Google+
My question to Ray Kurzweil:
It is said that 1 billion jobs will be lost in 10 years. Could you provide us with precise job examples or profiles that typically belong to the "past" (now) and to the future (2014 + onward)? Are job descriptions and stethoscopes a relic from the past?

"Interpreting genetic variation in a single human requires tens of thousand genomes"

The supercomputer meets the sequencer: 240 full genomes in 2 days

McCarthy completes JCVenterInst landmark netzero energy lab in La Jolla

"Medicine gets up close and personal."

Robin Cook and Eric Topol: "How Digital Medicine Will Soon Save Your Life."

"You wake up with chest pain. Your smartphone reads your ECG. If it's a heart attack, it calls an ambulance and sends your data ahead to the ER"....

Computation-Intensive Probabilistic and Statistical Methods for Large-Scale Population Genomics

Peer-To-Peer Healthcare

http://medicinex.stanford.edu

BioBank Goes Digital


A new micro-robotic technique for 3D-printing tissues

What personal results would you want from whole genome sequencing?

"3D manufacturing biotechs can make physical things, but not create knowledge."

http://www.kurzweilai.net/ask-ray-question-about-molecular-assemblers

"Google Unveils A Smartphone Prototype That Maps The World."

"While waiting for the nanopore revolution in sequencing."

"Are you ready for 3-parent embryos? The FDA is reviewing!"

La géolocalisation s'invite aux urgences


The 10 Rules Of Emotional Health

"First rule of emotional health: Don't beg for attention.
Second rule of emotional health: Don't let other people bring you down.
Third rule of emotional health: Don't hold grudges.
Fourth rule of emotional health: Do your own thing.
Fifth rule of emotional health: Believe in yourself. Always. 
Sixth rule of emotional health: Don't be afraid to love.
Seventh rule of emotional health: Don't be afraid to slow down. 
Eighth rule of emotional health: Learn to say "No".
Ninth rule of emotional health: Give back.
Tenth (and last) rule of emotional health: Remember, happiness is a decision."

Whole genome analysis speeds up: 240 full genomes in 50 hours

10 guidelines for developing an effective patient-facing mobile app

FDA: "How to Regulate Fecal Transplants."

Facebook, WhatsApp and the "missense SNP variant" theory

"New therapies raise hope for a breakthrough in tackling cancer."

"New study shows no benefit to screening mammography, a $100 million industry in the U.S."

Er, yeah, I'm French ;-)


Welcome!


Wired: This Woman Invented a Way to Run 30 Lab Tests on Only One Drop of Blood

Welcome to Genomics England!

"The liquid biopsy of cancers: diagnosis (dx), prognosis across most tumors."

AAAS Launches Open-Access Journal, 'Science Advances'

Is Organ Transplant An Epidemiologic Nonsense?

To cure cancer, we will need to target gene mutations; not the organ.

"Is the crisis of obesity hiding a bigger problem?"

"Both a surgeon and a self-experimenter, Peter Attia hopes to ease the diabetes epidemic by challenging what we think we know and improving the scientific rigor in nutrition and obesity research."

"Wireless System Could Offer a Private Fast Lane."

"Finding suitable targets is the major obstacle to cancer gene therapy."

Has The Patient Become A Healthcare CIO?

http://citiustech.com/images/HIMSS%20Mindmap.jpg

An App That Shares Top Clinical Studies

An Engineering Feat Gives Hearts Extra Life

LVADs
"Left ventricular assist devices (LVAD) are implantable heart pumps that were created to temporarily support patients with advanced heart failure as the bridge between diagnoses and transplant. However, with new scientific advancements, LVADs are becoming a long-term tool for improving heart function without transplant.
The right ventricle pumps blood to the lungs, but the left ventricle is responsible for pumping blood to the rest of the entire body, making it much more susceptible to failure. Therefore, LVADs have been the focus of most modern research to prolong and improve life saving implants."

Mechanical circulatory support: well, Pr. Daniel Loisance, a French cardiac surgeon, asked in November 2004 if we were ready for this major shift of paradigm: from heart transplant to mechanical circulatory support (LVADs)... Answer comes 10 years later with this Forbes article...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolefisher/2014/02/18/an-engineering-feat-gives-hearts-extra-life/



Watson goes wellness

"Thirty years later than his 1949 book, George Orwell's dystopian future projections coming true at the airport and hospital."

2014 Google Science Fair, students can submit ideas (due May 12)

J. Craig Venter: "A new beginning for medicine will soon be announced."

Welcome to the era of lab engineered body parts!

"Family presence for Brain Death Evaluation. Should families be present for brain stem testing?"

http://www.acepnow.com/article/ed-physicians-tweet-etools-ketamine-evaluating-brain-death-free-open-access-meducation-foam/

Turn your smartphone into a digital microscope

Reproductive medicine via genomics is leaping ahead

New tech to sequence human genome in 15 minutes for about $120

http://www.nature.com/news/nanopore-genome-sequencer-makes-its-debut-1.10051







WikiLeaks now offers a search engine to help you find documents linked to any keyword

"This old man."

e-Patient Dave's talk at NQF Annual Meeting Feb 13, 2014


"Clean cut genetics" - how gene-editing technique CRISPR could transform genetic research

"A ghost heart?"

"While non-coding regions may not be considered low hanging fruit, they may represent critical missing piece of puzzle."

Science meets Art - The human body artist-style

"Privacy VS Health. Would you make the trade?"

Exploring Personal Genomics with Dr. Paul Beaver -- Welcome to Fitgenes, the Australian 23&me

"We are good at keeping people alive, but we are not good at keeping them healthy. (...) Life expectancy is increasing, but health expectancy is decreasing."

One-size-fits-all medicine is not working"... 

Dr. Paul Beaver explains how, in this context, personal genomics -- patient-centered medicine -- jumps in!

Startup Is Developing an Optogenetics Treatment to Stop Pain

The Business of Genomics... great infographic around genomics.


http://rockhealth.com/2013/12/visual-wednesdays-business-genomics/

DNA-> Patient-specific 3D protein + supercomputer-> right drug

Researchers developed "a low-cost device that could help pathologists diagnose pancreatic cancer earlier and faster."

Time for New DNA Synthesis and Sequencing Cost Curves

Svante Pääbo: the DNA hunter taking us back to our roots

Fantastic Lego pain management assessment chart

This list makes us optimistic about actual innovation in healthcare