Amazon extends its "Concerning" Reach into Healthcare
Meanwhile German Scientists have observed heart regeneration in Zebrafish and will be furthering their investigation into genetics
Amazon Extends Its “Concerning” Reach Into Healthcare with One Medical Acquisition
On Thursday, Amazon announced it would be acquiring One Medical, a primary care provider and telehealth service, for $3.9 billion. This move will be one of Amazon’s most expensive acquisitions and the largest of its growing healthcare business.
Reactions to Amazon’s acquisition of One Medical have been largely negative, ranging from mild concern to bona fide outrage. But why is this specific acquisition particularly concerning when Amazon has already made previous moves in the healthcare space? The main reason is that the services that One Medical provides are significantly different from other ventures Amazon has made into the healthcare space. Amazon’s online pharmacy PillPack and corporate telehealth service Amazon Care are less concerning because they are not as consumer-facing and face so much competition that they have to price reasonably. But with One Medical, Amazon now owns physical primary care locations that service 736,000 patients.
While Amazon ostensibly wants to make healthcare cheaper and more accessible, consumers and regulators alike are worried that these moves will give Amazon too much power over its customers.
“Amazon’s purchase of a primary care provider network should be deeply concerning to American families and antitrust regulators,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said. “Amazon already has too much economic power, a terrible track record with workers, and alarmingly little clinical experience, which raises major questions about how this deal could impact consumer prices and health care choices.”
For example, through One Medical, Amazon could preference its own pharmacy when treating its patients. While this might result in lower prices in the short term, monopolistic, anti-competitive tactics have a nasty habit of resulting in higher prices for customers in the long-term.
Individuals are also concerned about Amazon’s access to One Medical’s trove of healthcare data. Like other tech giants, Amazon has usually approached data with the goal of extracting as much monetary value out of it as possible. While HIPAA still places limits on how Amazon can use this data, patients are still reasonably concerned about the commodification of their healthcare data.
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Learning About Heart Regeneration Through Zebrafish
Zebrafish have a unique ability to regenerate their hearts after they have been damaged due to injury. Human hearts, on the other hand, can not regenerate and the damage done after say, a heart attack, is permanent. While the build up of scar tissue will be able to keep the heart going for a while, it does not fully repair it. As a result, cardiac disease is one of the leading causes of death worldwide.
Scientists at the Max Delbruck Center in Germany have been studying how zebrafish are able to regenerate their hearts and recently published a paper on how fibroblasts help with heart regeneration. The researchers found that there are three main classes of fibroblasts that form after a heart attack in zebrafish. They also found that these fibroblasts play a role in heart regeneration. It is not quite clear how the fibroblasts do it but their presence seems to have a positive role.
In humans, fibroblasts form scar tissue and do not regenerate the heart by any means. So the subsequent investigation will be into identifying the differences between human fibroblast and zebrafish fibroblast gene expression. Once we can figure out what is different, we might be able to apply what we learn into developing heart regeneration promoting therapies for humans.
This work is still very early and a lot needs to be done before it can be useful, but with a model organism that is naturally able to do what we wish we could do, there is a lot of hope that we will get there.
Featured Fake News
As literally no surprise to anyone, there is once again a new study people are misinterpreting to claim that the vaccines fail.
This time the study being misinterpreted is from Harvard and was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Both highly credible sources.
In short and sweet, the study found that vaccinated people who got infected had longer term protection than the people who just got vaccinated but were never infected. Essentially, infections after vaccination are generally good long term. The reason?
Well, because vaccinated people who got infected didn’t end up hospitalized and so they get longer immunity without the most serious consequences. However if you are unvaccinated, the probability of getting hospitalized is considerably higher, and an infection will not give you as much protection as you would get if you were vaccinated before the infection.
You can read more about the Protection and Waning of Natural Immunity in this study.
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