| | | | |  | | By Ruth Reader, Gregory Svirnovskiy, Carmen Paun, Daniel Payne and Erin Schumaker | | | | | 
Verily's Andrew Trister at POLITICO's Health Care Summit. | Rod Lamkey for POLITICO | Health care industry leaders and regulators mingled at yesterday’s POLITICO Health Care Summit. Andrew Trister, chief science officer at Verily, Google’s health tech sister company, took the opportunity to ask the government officials for some clarity on their plans for safeguarding patient information in the artificial intelligence era, highlighting the inadequacy of current rules. “We'd like to see regulations that are very clear about how to move forward,” Trister said at the summit. Why it matters: Patient data is largely protected by a decades-old rule that long preceded AI and data-gathering digital devices. Absent new rules from the government, Verily discloses its data collection and sharing practices upfront and obtains patient consent. Even so: In a class-action suit, patients sued Verily’s sister company, Google, and the University of Chicago Medical Center for improperly selling anonymized patient data. The plaintiffs argued that the University of Chicago had breached its own privacy policy for sharing data with Google. While the suit was unsuccessful, it highlights the complicated landscape for health care providers and AI companies. What’s next? Verily is not waiting for the regulators. Trister is looking to industry organizations like the Coalition for Health AI to set flexible standards on artificial intelligence in health care. He said the group's model, along with assurance labs that validate AI, can more nimbly safeguard patients. “The idea here would be that we don't have to rely upon the FDA or [the National Institute of Standards and Technology] or other government agencies to keep up with all of the changes that are happening,” he said.
| | | | JOIN US ON 3/21 FOR A TALK ON FINANCIAL LITERACY: Americans from all communities should be able to save, build wealth, and escape generational poverty, but doing so requires financial literacy. How can government and industry ensure access to digital financial tools to help all Americans achieve this? Join POLITICO on March 21 as we explore how Congress, regulators, financial institutions and nonprofits are working to improve financial literacy education for all. REGISTER HERE. | | | | | | | | | 
Weeki Wachee Spring, Florida. | Shawn Zeller/POLITICO | This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care. California lawmakers recently formed a committee to help increase happiness in the state, CalMatters reports. Policy ideas thrown out at a recent hearing ranged from the ambitious (universal health care) to the outdoorsy (more urban green space). Share any thoughts, news, tips and feedback with Carmen Paun at cpaun@politico.com, Daniel Payne at dpayne@politico.com, Ruth Reader at rreader@politico.com or Erin Schumaker at eschumaker@politico.com. Send tips securely through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp.
| | |  There's a link between global warming and increased fertility, researchers found. | MONEY SHARMA/AFP via Getty Images | Global warming might be associated with increased fertility. That was a surprising finding in a study by researchers at the University of North Carolina and Pennsylvania State University published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this month. “It wasn’t something we were expecting at all,” Clark Gray, a UNC-Chapel Hill professor of geography and environment, told Gregory. How so? Gray theorizes that global warming reduces women’s access to contraception and health care overall. “It takes resources, it takes time, energy, money to control your fertility if you're a woman in the Global South,” Gray said of developing countries. “People don't have routine access to health care like we do in the United States. And so, if your access to contraception was interrupted because you don't have the money or you can't travel or because you had to move, then it makes sense that your fertility would go up.” By the numbers: The researchers parsed data from 2.5 million women in 109,000 sites across 59 countries, including numbers on reproductive health, body mass index and migration. Besides increased fertility, they found that exposure to high temperatures and unusual precipitation was also associated with increased rates of underweight babies and a decrease in women’s desire to have another child. The big picture: Europe’s record 2022 summer heat wave appears to be linked to 56 percent more deaths among women than men. And in November 2023, the World Health Organization called climate change “an urgent threat” for children and pregnant women.
| | | | DON’T MISS AN IMPORTANT TALK ON ACCESS TO AFFORDABLE PRESCRIPTION DRUGS IN CA: Join POLITICO on March 19 to dive into the challenges of affordable prescription drugs accessibility across the state. While Washington continues to debate legislative action, POLITICO will explore the challenges unique to California, along with the potential pitfalls and solutions the CA Legislature must examine to address prescription drug affordability for its constituents. REGISTER HERE. | | | | | | | | |  West Virginia's putting its venture capital funds behind a push to create new addiction medicine. | Jeff Dean/AP | West Virginia is hoping to transform a former pill factory in Morgantown into a bioscience hub that develops drugs to combat opioid use disorder and PTSD. This month, the state’s venture capital fund — the West Virginia Jobs Investment Trust — and the state’s economic development authority announced a $5 million strategic investment in GATC Health, a California-based company that’s using artificial intelligence to simulate human physiology, which it thinks will accelerate the development of new drugs. GATC Health is in the early stages of researching compounds that have the potential to treat opioid use disorder and PTSD, according to Tyrone Lam, GATC Health chief operating officer. The company has identified several therapeutic targets in the brain related to addiction, he said, and its AI platform has identified compounds that address those targets. One of them repairs areas of the brain changed by addiction, according to the company. Tests on rats addicted to fentanyl proved the company’s AI platform can successfully predict efficacy, safety and potential side effects, the company said. Why it matters: West Virginia has been one of the states hardest hit by the opioid epidemic. What’s next? The investment from West Virginia and partnerships with West Virginia University and other academic institutions will help GATC gather the data necessary to apply for first-stage human clinical trials, Lam said. | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |
