Bloomlife (bloom life.com) is a women’s health company that combines wearables with data analytics to improve birth outcomes by keeping moms-to-be reassured and doctors informed with prenatal data.
Isono Health (isonohealth.com) is democratizing breast cancer screening by developing a plat-form that combines automated ultrasound with AI to empower women with regular and acces-sible breast health monitoring to help with early detection of breast cancer.
Litmus Health (litmus health.com) is a clinical data science platform focused on health-related quality
of life. They are currently involved in a pilot trial
in Crohn’s disease patients in collabo-ration
with Takeda.
Data will be passively and actively collected from
tri-al participants’ smartphones. This data is used
to help clinical researchers make better go and
no-go decisions based on patients’ environment,
lifestyle, diet and activity.
Bloomlife
ISONO HEALTH
Litmus health
GENE EDITING
Jennifer Doudna, Ph.D is a professor of molecular and cell biology and chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, where she holds the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biomedical and Health Sciences, and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
She is a co- inventor of CRISPRCas9, a process that revolutionized gene editing that began with curiosity about how bacteria fight viruses.
As well as delivering a layman’s overview of the process, she spoke about the promises of this technology onstage at SXSW. In her keynote lecture, Doudna noted that while this technology is in its early stages, it is developing rapidly and is already 'being deployed for existing applications’.
“What if a cell’s DNA could be edited just like the text of a document so that you could actually erase letters, you could erase whole sentences, [you could] replace sentences, and you could do things that would enable scientists to change the mutations that might cause genetic disease, make changes that allow us to understand the function of DNA and different kinds of organisms and perhaps, enable us to really direct the way that organisms are evolving on the planet?”
For example, CRISPR Cas9 tech has important applications for treating diseases. The use of Cas9 gene editing could be used to correct the mutations that cause blood-related diseases such as sickle cell anemia.