Google makes mosquitoes

For Your Eyes Only

Before I dive into the topic this week, a few housekeeping notes from the CB Insights team. 

Our product has under gone a major overhaul, clients will notice this immediately. One of the major changes is that our research is going to have deeper integrations with the product itself and there’s a brand new digital health research page. 

But another big shift is that more and more of our content is going to start going behind a paywall, available to clients only. For the whole story about why, we wrote about it.

You’ll start seeing more “expert research” popping up, including some posts we’ve done analyzing IBM Watson’s health partnerships and 200+ pharma/biotech companies in clinical trials. 

We want our clients to have an edge thanks to our research. If that sounds like you, sign up for a free trial.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming

At our Future of Fintech conference a couple of weeks ago, we gave one of our “N+1” keynote addresses. This is basically our view of some possible scenarios for the future, a byproduct of binge watching Black Mirror, including a few related to healthcare. 

One we talked about, for example, is the idea of precision insurance. In a future scenario, if understanding your entire genome/exome means knowing risk at a more granular level, then maybe health and life insurance can move from a population-based assessment model to a personalized one. This of course leads to lots of questions about genetic transparency and the need for regulation to play a bigger role here.

We’ll be talking more about regulation and genetic data in our upcoming genomics webinar. Sign up here.

Another potential controversial concept we came up with was the idea of “human IPOs,” essentially being able to sell stock in yourself/future earnings to finance upfront costs like a necessary surgery. Many have already turned to crowdfunding sites to cover this kind of catastrophic care, with the “medical” category on GoFundMe significantly rising.

What if instead of taking on debt to cover their costs or donations from strangers, people sold a portion of the income they would have lost from being sick? But then obvious ethics questions kick in, including should shareholders have a say in how you live your life? This experiment is actually being tried funnily enough…

You can see the full presentation here and get the slides here.

Stay healthy,
Nikhil
@nikillinit

P.S. If you missed our 58-slide trends in pharma briefing, get it here.