GeekWire Health Tech

Oct 19 2021 53 ep. 26 mins 411

GeekWire Health Tech Podcast artwork

Health Tech is a GeekWire podcast that explores the cutting edge of digital health. On each episode, we bring you stories about innovative technologies for patients, doctors and more, giving you a window into the future of health. Our fifth season is sponsored by Premera Blue Cross. Learn more about Premera here: https://www.premera.com/premera-voices/

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Inside Seattle's life sciences boom

Oct 19 2021 48 mins

Five years ago, when Dr. Leslie Alexandre arrived in Seattle to lead the industry group Life Science Washington, she found a community in a mild state of shock. "One of the real challenges was our ecosystem had tons of great research going on, and many wonderful companies, but I think our industry was a little bit in the doldrums in 2016, in part because Amgen had just completed mo

Testing Amazon's COVID Test

Aug 04 2021 33 mins

Amazon made headlines at the height of the pandemic for developing its own COVID-19 testing system for its workers. The same test is now available to the public for $40. You can order the test on Amazon.com, take it at home and ship it to Amazon to get your results. So what is it like to take Amazon’s COVID test? We decided to find out. On this episode, GeekWire reporte

What it's like to use Amazon Pharmacy

Jun 24 2021 31 mins

Amazon's move into healthcare is multifaceted, including COVID-19 testing, its Halo health band and service, cloud services for healthcare and life sciences, and even primary care for its employees. A major motivation for the company: the sheer size of the healthcare market, and the massive problems to be solved. "Amazon is a big company now, still with big growth ambitions, and so

Son's rare disease inspires dad to disrupt drug development

May 12 2021 21 mins

Before their son was born, Sanath Kumar Ramesh and his wife Ramya had normal first-time-parent jitters. Ramesh, who works for Amazon as a software engineering manager, was so excited to welcome his little boy. He was ready for the challenges and rewards of parenthood. In August 2018, Raghav was born, and Ramesh’s life began changing in ways he’d never expected. On this

How AI will accelerate the response to the next pandemic

Mar 31 2021 27 mins

The speed of the creation of vaccines for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 was a modern marvel. You might already have already gotten yours. But what if vaccines and therapeutics could emerge even faster in response to the next pandemic. That’s one of the goals of a $5 million gift from Microsoft to the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington Sch

Walter Isaacson on the gene editing revolution

Mar 09 2021 33 mins

Walter Isaacson has studied and written extensively about the physics and technology revolutions as the biographer of such figures as Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs. But after writing his latest book, he is convinced there's a far more momentous revolution in the works. "The next few decades are going to be the era of biotech," he said in a GeekWire podcast conversation about his n

Finding secrets of life in close brushes with death

Mar 04 2021 24 mins

To help people live, Mark Roth scrutinizes those who've come frighteningly close to dying. People who have been lost in the frozen wilderness in a Mount Rainier whiteout or stowed away in the wheel well of a trans-Pacific jet. People who have suffered massive heart attacks or body-crushing car wrecks. Roth, a biochemist and cell biologist at Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Researc

Testing a new COVID-19 test

Feb 26 2021 34 mins

GeekWire editor Todd Bishop: On a cold, clear weekday morning last month, my quest to figure out whether I had COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic took me to my back porch, where a mobile phlebotomist drew my blood. It had been 10 months since I was sick, and I had already received a negative result on a standard antibody test. That earlier test was designed to detect

'Data saves lives': U.S. health systems unite behind new startup

Feb 11 2021 20 mins

A group of 14 U.S. health systems, representing tens of millions of patients across 40 states, will pool data using software developed by Seattle startup Truveta, leveraging artificial intelligence to search for medical breakthroughs and previously undetected patterns of inequity in healthcare. The company, led by former Microsoft Windows chief Terry Myerson, gave new details about

Halo Effect: Amazon, privacy, and the future of health

Jan 21 2021 30 mins

GeekWire editor Todd Bishop: A few weeks ago, I started wearing a new health band. It regularly eavesdrops on my side of conversations, and it has a lot of opinions about them. “You had three phrases that sounded annoyed, irritated or disgusted," a section in the app reported on a recent evening, recapping my daily interactions. Not only that, but I had "one phrase that sound