9 ms·
Google Aims a $50M Moonshot at Curing Heart Disease
- berntb 11y agoGoogle shows what they know: Advertising. :-) At least it worked for me, it just became more likely I switch to Android next time (there are a lot of heart problems among my relatives). This also have a high chance of literally saving the lives of people whose money is put down here. In short: Thanks.
- nonbel 11y ago>"For instance, the entire project will be in the hands of a single leader. That person is far from pre-determined. With a laugh, Conrad said the screening process began with the announcement that the job exists. He wants proposals that can fit on a single piece of paper. The single most important requirement is a creative vision. “It could be a teenager in Wisconsin who has a brilliant idea,” Conrad said. “The best idea should triumph." [..] The leader will be tasked with putting together an overall plan, which includes assembling a team of researchers, engineers, scientists and other specialists." http://blog.heart.org/american-heart-association-google-life-sciences-seeking-novel-strategies-to-prevent-heart-disease/ http://blog.heart.org/american-heart-association-google-life... I don't mean to be negative, I am glad to see new sources of funding for biomed. But I do not understand how this would work. What would the role of this teenager in Wisconsin be beyond writing the application? How would they know who to assemble onto the team, etc? Also, a single page proposal?
- Fomite 11y ago> Also, a single page proposal? A lot of small pilot proposals are pretty short - Gates Challenge, proposals for example are two pages, and I've done some investigator-initiated grants from industry that are only a couple pages long. My guess is they'll be slicing the actual $50M pretty thinly.
- jacquesm 11y agoIt sounds like a scene from a movie ("the Exam").
- firebones 11y agoIt sounds more like they're looking for the next Elizabeth Holmes (of Theranos).
- Alex3917 11y agoGiven that the AHA is basically a front for the meat and cheese industry, I don't see why Google is funneling money to them. You might as well pay Coca-Cola to 'research' diabetes or Exxon to 'research' climate change.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Vraxx 11y agoCould you please provide some sources for this claim? If this is legitimately true, I would like to know this, but a random statement on the internet leaves me rather skeptical.
- Alex3917 11y agohttps://www.cspinet.org/integrity/nonprofits/american_heart_association.html https://www.cspinet.org/integrity/nonprofits/american_heart_... http://www.foodpolitics.com/2011/02/american-heart-association-says-i-%E2%99%A5-beef/ http://www.foodpolitics.com/2011/02/american-heart-associati... They also lobby against government policies that would eliminate meat from school lunches, even though they would vastly reduce the incidence of heart disease in the U.S.
- vpribish 11y agovery interesting links! but far from damning - they make a couple of percent of their income from the heart-check logos which were put on several lean cuts of beef. ConAgra donates some money (they were among the top couple dozen contributors - most of which were medical companies.) color me not-outraged, but more informed.
- Alex3917 11y agoYou really don't see anything unethical about accepting money to promote ineffective drugs, red meat, and junk food as the cures to heart disease?
- nostromo 11y ago> If you want the $50 million, your idea has to fit on a single page. A whole page? What a waste of space. The cure, for most people, would fit in a fortune cookie: don't smoke & exercise more. This makes me wonder why they aren't focusing on something that is less preventable, namely cancer.
- melling 11y agoAccording to the CDC, 1 in 4 deaths in the US is from heart disease. http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm Where are you getting your information? According to the article it is the most common form of death in the world. "Cardiovascular disease kills more people on Earth than anything else—over 17 million a year"
- nostromo 11y agoI'm not saying it's a cure ex post facto -- but heart disease is largely preventable. Similarly, the easiest approach to preventing lung cancer is to not smoke.
- melling 11y agoOnce again, where are you getting your facts? The largest killer on the planet only requires that we all get more exercise? My guess is that you're just making up your facts. Sure, some deaths are preventable but you're completely wrong in saying that it's a 100% lifestyle issue.
- atomical 11y agoPreventing heart disease means lowering LDL. The standard American diet has a lot of cholesterol. Are you suggesting it is genetic?
- JamesBarney 11y agoThe cholesterol guidelines have just been relaxed because of very little link between dietary cholesterol and blood lipid levels.
- randcraw 11y ago$50M over 5 years is a "moonshot"? Let's hope Wired is to blame for such hype; Google surely knows better. Even $50B is no moonshot. Try $500B to $5T and a commitment of many thousands of man-years. Now THAT's a moonshot. $50M is not even "A War on Heart Disease". At most it's a skirmish. To wit, $50M/5 years is $10M per year. In Silly Valley, that buys you up to 20 staff, with no lab. So in 5 years, 20 Googlers armed only with whiteboards will succeed beyond the thousands and billions and decades of scientific research that have gone before? Gotta love the reality distortion field that is SV.
- ma2rten 11y agoI thought that moonshot just means "unlikely to succeed, but with potential to be big".
- tinco 11y agoThey're going to cure heart disease, not write the next snapchat. I bet in most states and most cities it'll buy you a lab and 50 staff and enough goods for a while. They won't have to actually produce the cure, just develop enough theory and experiments to convince investors to drop a billion on them for going through everything that's needed for human testing.
- InvisibleCities 11y ago>They're going to cure heart disease, not write the next snapchat. Are you suggesting that curing heart disease is an easier and cheaper endeavor than building a mobile app for sharing photos?
- nugget 11y agoStatins alone are a >$10b annual market, down from $20b annually before Lipitor's patent expired. Pharma companies have proven that curative treatments can be priced near the net present value of all future disease management costs, making cures the most lucrative area of pharma (a good thing if it leads to more of them). There are billions of private dollars being sunk into heart disease annually. I'm not sure exactly what Google is after here but $50m is not going to move the needle from a funding or incentive perspective.
- abalone 11y agoOr, 0.8% of the NIH's annual funding for curing heart disease. That's nice, but the tech press is doing is pretty poor job conveying the overall role of public vs private funding in basic science research. Same issue came up around YC Research. It's true that Google's approach is to hand more money to one team instead of spreading it among many investigators. But the overall tone of the article is there are "swings" in funding and private companies are stepping in with "jackpot" grants to save the day. If you didn't read closely you might even think public funding is drying up and Silicon Valley private investors are the future of core science research. This fundamentally and completely confuses how core science research happens and in fact how Silicon Valley itself was created and functions today (with respect to core tech research through agencies like DARPA as well as medical science via NIH). Collaboration with the private sector is an important piece of that but this one figure puts it in perspective: The annual NIH budget for heart research alone is $1.2 billion. Bottom line, you can still thank Uncle Sam and taxpayers for most major research.
- Fomite 11y agoThat was my first thought. "Oh, this'll be a really nice handful of R01 style grants..."
- melted 11y agoTake it for what it is: a cheap way to score PR points. Most Google "moonshot" projects not related to ads fall into this category. Fucking internet in Africa from self driving robotic balloons.
- buyx 11y agoInternet in Africa from balloons would solve many issues. Mobile internet has far more penetration than fixed-line broadband because of infrastructure challenges. Providing another means of low-cost wireless connectivity to millions of people would be a powerful enabler, and drive costs down. I constantly find myself surprised by how quickly Africans, who are pretty much written off by most people, adapt to new technologies.
- dbcooper 11y agoIs there a actually any information in that press release (or the near verbatim Wired article) on what research this will fund? I could not see any.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- redthrowaway 11y ago>And as you might expect from a Silicon Valley giant that believes in moving fast and breaking things They also believe in thinking differently and putting a PC on every desktop.
- kzhahou 11y agoYes, the $$ amount is unrealistic for any true cure. But won't it be great if they fund non-traditional (i.e., silicon valley) people who maybe get even a single advancement in cardiac care? Certainly that's money well spent. I hope they do well.
- kzhahou 11y agoYes, the $$ amount is unrealistic for any true cure. But won't it be great if they fund non-traditional (i.e., silicon valley) people who maybe get even a single advancement in cardiac care? Certainly that's money well spent. I hope they do well.
- DiabloD3 11y agoI don't understand the point of this research. We already cured heart disease: take grains (including corn and soy), refined sugars, legumes, and seed oils out of your diet, increase red meat, healthy fat, and vegetable intake, and do regular exercise. For those that already have heart disease, increase Omega 3 (triglyceride or phospholipid bound, not ethyl ester), CoQ10, and PQQ supplementation to help repair the damage. When the media talks about "curing heart disease", they really mean "curing it without eating healthy, which is the only known cure". Why doesn't everyone just learn to eat healthy instead? It fixes everything. Edit: Down-voting me without actually commenting why you disagree doesn't really help. Why do you think eating strange diets that have only really been recently developed since the end of WW2 are healthy or medically necessary? Especially since the rise of heart disease, diabetes, and chronic obesity have only become a problem during the same time period, even after accounting for better detection and diagnosis rates.
- JamesBarney 11y agoI didn't downvote you but I think you are being downvoted because you give the impression that if I asked the leading experts in cardiology how to avoid heart disease they would give me the definite answer you have. However if you talked to the top 100 cardiologists they would not all share your views. For instance everyone agrees vegetables and exercise are great. The information about COQ10, PQQ, and omega-3s are still very much in their infancy. Many doctors would disagree with out about red meat. Exactly what is healthy fat, and how much we should intake could be debated for eons. One of the top cardiologists in the U.S. just told my friends father to stop eating all fats and meats to reduce his risk of heart disease. With regards to legumes, people who live in a "blue zones"(places with very large number of people 100 years or older+) eat a legume heavy diet. So I don't think that the problems is as simple and solved as you make it out to be.
- mikeash 11y agoDo people who do all of this stuff have a zero chance of heart disease, or does it just greatly reduce the chances?
- mehwoot 11y agoEspecially since the rise of heart disease, diabetes, and chronic obesity have only become a problem during the same time period Right, because we can't think of a single other factor that has changed during that time period apart from diet?
- pilatesfordogs 11y agoHow does Google plan to succeed when the entire medical establishment has been trying to do the same thing for years ?
- nonbel 11y agoNot sarcastic: At what point do you start considering the medical establishment is down a dead end path? How much time and money needs to be spent? Maybe we need to restart from the understanding in 1932 or whenever.
- danieltillett 11y agoA bit late google. Depending on what you mean by heart disease (it is a very broad category), but if you mean heart disease caused by high cholesterol then it has already been cured and available as a license monoclonal - Evolocumab [1]. We know that knocking the protein it targets (PCSK9) is without side-effects in humans [2]. It will take a few years before everyone is on it, but basically all the science is done. Edit. Personally I like the vaccine approach [3] as it could be low cost and avoid the need for monthly injections, but I doubt we will ever see this taken through to market. If google wanted to do some good then spend their money sponsoring a human trial of the PCSK9 vaccine. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolocumab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolocumab 2. http://www.nature.com/news/genetics-a-gene-of-rare-effect-1.12773 http://www.nature.com/news/genetics-a-gene-of-rare-effect-1.... 3. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X15013201 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X15...
- asdfologist 11y agoYep, you gotta hand it to HackerNews. A company donates $50M towards a good cause that can save lives, and everyone takes a shit all over it. How did you spend your last 50 bucks?