Category Archives: Human Longevity

San Francisco Business Times

SoFi president decamps for San Diego biotech San Francisco Business Times Nino Fanlo, who served as SoFi's president and chief financial officer, will leave the fintech at the end of the month to join Human Longevity Inc. He will be replaced on an interim basis by Steven Freiberg, a former Citigroup Inc. exec who sits on ... SoFi President Nino Fanlo to Leave Firm for Biotech StartupWall Street Journal (subscription) all 3 news articles »

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SoFi president decamps for San Diego biotech - San Francisco Business Times

AIG Names Duperreault as CEO

American International Group named Brian Duperreault-a onetime lieutenant to former CEO Maurice R. "Hank" Greenberg-as the firm's new chief executive.

Puerto Rico Development Bank Strikes Creditor Deal

Puerto Rico's insolvent industrial development bank announced a deal with creditors on how to distribute proceeds from its 10-year liquidation plan.

ECB's Nouy: Changes to European Banking Rules Don't Go Far Enough

European Central Bank's top bank supervisor Daniele Nouy said Monday that efforts to change European banking rules don't go far enough to iron out national differences

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Moody's Buys Dutch Data Provider Bureau van Dijk

Moody's Corp. said it has struck a deal to buy Dutch business data provider Bureau van Dijk for EUR3 billion ($3.27 billion) from Swedish private-equity fund EQT.

J.P. Morgan Buys Dublin Office Tower, Makes Room to Expand Outside London

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. is buying an office tower in Dublin's docklands business quarter, giving the U.S. bank significant space to expand outside of London when Britain leaves the European Union.

ValueAct's Jeffrey Ubben Hands Reins to Protg Mason Morfit

Activist investor Jeffrey Ubben is handing his $16 billion portfolio to the next generation, with ValueAct Capital Management tapping Mason Morfit to serve as chief investment officer.

China Central Bank Sets Up Panel to Study Fintech Sector

China's central bank has set up a committee on financial technology, or fintech, in a bid to enhance its study of the industry, which includes online lending platforms.

SEC Charges Ex-Nomura Traders With Lying to Customers

The SEC has charged two former co-head traders of the commercial mortgage-backed securities desk at Nomura Securities International with lying to customers to inflate profits.

SoFi President Nino Fanlo to Leave Firm for Biotech Startup

Nino Fanlo, SoFi's president and chief financial officer, is leaving the firm at the end of the month to take over as finance chief at Human Longevity Inc., a four-year-old genomics company.

Hackers' Apparent Take: $51,000

This weekend's wave of cyberattacks held up for ransom the computer files of more than 200,000 victims world-wide. The hackers' apparent take so far: $51,000-in bitcoin accounts that they may hesitate to tap.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 15, 2017 16:15 ET (20:15 GMT)

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News Highlights: Top Financial Services News of the Day - Fox Business

Microsoft Claims Stolen U.S. Government Code Fuels Cyberattack

Microsoft said that the software used in the global cyber assault that began Friday came from code stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency, adding that the attack should serve as a wake-up call for governments over the risks of hoarding such digital weapons for use against their enemies.

United's Cockpit Door Security Codes Inadvertently Revealed

United Continental Holdings Inc. sent out an alert about a breach in cockpit-door security procedures after a flight attendant mistakenly posted information that included access codes on a public website. The problem was subsequently fixed.

Alphabet's Waymo, Lyft to Collaborate on Self-Driving Cars

Ride-hailing startup Lyft and Waymo, the driverless-car division of Google parent Alphabet, said they would work together to develop autonomous vehicle technology, dealing another potential blow to rival Uber's ambitions.

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Vodacom to Buy 35% Stake in Kenya's Safaricom From Vodafone

Vodacom, South Africa's largest mobile operator by subscribers, is buying a 35% stake in Kenya's Safaricom in the hope of popularizing the highly-touted East African mobile money service M-Pesa across the broader continent. The $2.59 billion deal is a reshuffling of the pack for Vodafone, which has big stakes in both companies, in Africa.

Nintendo Developing 'Legend of Zelda' Smartphone Game

Nintendo plans to offer its game "The Legend of Zelda" for smartphones, the Kyoto company's latest effort to expand its mobile-games lineup.

Western Digital Takes Toshiba to Arbitration Over Joint Unit

Toshiba Corp. and Western Digital Corp. ratcheted up a clash over their chip-making joint venture, with the fate of the Japanese industrial conglomerate lying in the balance.

Renault Looks to Resume Production at Some Plants

French auto maker Renault was scrambling Sunday to resume operations at plants across Europe after its computer systems were hit by a virus that swept the globe.

Katy Industries Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection

Katy Industries Inc., a manufacturer of commercial cleaning and consumer storage products, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Sunday with a plan to sell its assets to an investment vehicle called Jansan Acquisition.

NASA's Mega-Rocket and Deep-Space Capsule Face Concerns

Sending astronauts to the moon and beyond is projected to pose particularly significant safety risks during re-entry and landing. Budget and production woes have further delayed NASA's human exploration program for deep space, with federal watchdogs raising fresh concerns about safety.

SoFi President Nino Fanlo to Leave Firm for Biotech Startup

Nino Fanlo, SoFi's president and chief financial officer, is leaving the firm at the end of the month to take over as finance chief at Human Longevity Inc., a four-year-old genomics company.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 15, 2017 05:15 ET (09:15 GMT)

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News Highlights: Top Company News of the Day | Fox Business - Fox Business

Alphabet's Waymo, Lyft to Collaborate on Self-Driving Cars

Ride-hailing startup Lyft and Waymo, the driverless car division of Google parent Alphabet, said they would work together to develop autonomous vehicle technology, dealing another potential blow to rival Uber Technologies Inc.'s ambitions.

Nintendo Developing 'The Legend of Zelda' Smartphone Game

Nintendo plans to offer its game "The Legend of Zelda" for smartphones, the Kyoto company's latest effort to expand its mobile-games lineup.

Western Digital Takes Toshiba to Arbitration Over Joint Unit

Western Digital Corp. ratcheted up the pressure in its dispute with Toshiba Corp., filing a request for binding arbitration to prevent the company from selling its stake in operations jointly owned by the two companies.

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Microsoft Claims Stolen U.S. Government Code Fuels Cyberattack

Microsoft said that the software used in the global cyber assault that began Friday came from code stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency, adding that the attack should serve as a wake-up call for governments over the risks of hoarding such digital weapons for use against their enemies.

Renault Looks to Resume Production at Some Plants

French auto maker Renault was scrambling Sunday to resume operations at plants across Europe after its computer systems were hit by a virus that swept the globe.

Katy Industries Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection

Katy Industries Inc., a manufacturer of commercial cleaning and consumer storage products, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Sunday with a plan to sell its assets to an investment vehicle called Jansan Acquisition.

NASA's Mega-Rocket and Deep-Space Capsule Face Concerns

Sending astronauts to the moon and beyond is projected to pose particularly significant safety risks during re-entry and landing. Budget and production woes have further delayed NASA's human exploration program for deep space, with federal watchdogs raising fresh concerns about safety.

SoFi President Nino Fanlo to Leave Firm for Biotech Startup

Nino Fanlo, SoFi's president and chief financial officer, is leaving the firm at the end of the month to take over as finance chief at Human Longevity Inc., a four-year-old genomics company.

TPG-Led Consortium Makes New Bid For Fairfax Media

Investors led by private-equity firm TPG Group submitted a revised takeover bid worth roughly 2.8 billion Australian dollars (US$2.1 billion) for newspaper publisher Fairfax Media.

United's Cockpit Door Security Codes Inadvertently Revealed

United Continental Holdings Inc. sent out an alert about a breach in cockpit-door security procedures after a flight attendant mistakenly posted information that included access codes on a public website. The problem was subsequently fixed.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 15, 2017 01:15 ET (05:15 GMT)

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News Highlights: Top Company News of the Day - Fox Business

Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Paschal Donohoe: hoping to avoid big rise in public pay levels. Photograph: Collins

The report of the Public Service Pay Commission published earlier this week is part of a process, the process of navigating a course towards a new public sector pay agreement.

As such, the report is not the work of an independent entity. It is the work of an entity embedded in the process, an entity essentially owned by the parties to that process: the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform on the one side, and the Public Services Committee of ICTU on the other.

The reports purpose, as I see it, is to provide a repository of research that is acceptable to the parties and that will facilitate the next stage of the process, the negotiations around the size and phasing of pay increases and related matters.

The report is designed to narrow the grounds for dispute between the parties. It does so, in the first instance, by setting out the considerations that matter in relation to determining public sector pay (the state of the public finances, equity between the public and private sectors, recruitment and retention), by presenting the salient data in respect of each of these considerations, and then by providing a layer of analysis and interpretation of the data.

The hope is that the list of considerations, the data assembled and the data analysis performed will not be contested when the pay talks proper begin in the next few weeks.

Of course, an outsider to the process, an interested taxpayer for example, may see things rather differently and may find plenty to take issue with in the reports analysis and conclusions.

An example is the commissions analysis of public-private earnings differentials. The purpose of such analysis is to assess whether public servants are paid more than their private sector counterparts on a like-for-like basis, that is when allowance is made for characteristics like age, education, experience and so on.

Most of the research carried out on this issue over the past 10-15 years has pointed to a sizeable public sector premium, that is a situation where, on a like-for-like basis, public servants are paid more than private sector employees. Not surprisingly, the more recent research indicates that the premium has declined since the onset of the financial crisis

The results of this sort of exercise are quite sensitive to the vector of characteristics included and also to other elements of the estimation technique, such as whether earnings are measured on a weekly or hourly basis.

The PSPC report, in fairness, enters the caveat about sensitivity, but gives prominence to a set of estimates of the public sector premium that are biased downwards by the inclusion of a trade union membership variable and the use of weekly rather than hourly earnings.

As a result, the PSPC suggests that the public-private earnings differential, estimated to be in the range 13-20 per cent in the early 2000s, had shrunk to virtually zero by 2014. This is a usefully neutral conclusion in so far as it may remove the issue from the agenda, but is it valid?

The best that private sector employees can hope for are in the latter class, but most private sector workers who have any occupational pensions at all are in modest vehicles like Golfs and Micras.

Then there is the very large fraction of private sector workers who either look after their own pension arrangements or have no occupational pension provision whatever. Many of these folk are in the horse-and-cart class.

In making comparisons between the two sectors, should the latter groups of private sector workers be included or not? The PSPC has judged that they should not be. As a result, the value it attaches to public service pensions relative to the private sector is greatly understated.

Public sector pensions are an enormous issue, not only on equity grounds, but also on grounds of cost. Compounding the cost problem (and also the equity problem) is the fact that they are not funded, but paid for out of general taxation.

Facing a future of ever lengthening human longevity and a rapidly aging population, not to mention the very considerable threats to the tax base that arise from the likes of Brexit and Trumponomics, policymakers need to think long and hard about the public service pension bill and how it might be contained.

Of course, the pay bill is not exempt from this sort of adjuration. Reflecting on the existential threats now posed to Irelands economic model of the past 50 years, Chris Johns, a columnist with this paper, wrote a few months ago that we should be putting the public finances on a war footing, by which he meant freezing current spending and taxes.

It might not be feasible to freeze public sector pay at current levels but, if I were Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Paschal Donohoe, I would be aiming for an outcome to the pay talks as close to that as possible.

Jim OLeary is an economist who resigned from the first benchmarking body before it published its report in 2002. He can be contacted at mail@jimoleary.ie

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Jim O'Leary: Taxpayers should be unhappy with pay commission report - Irish Times

Guardant Health has raised $360 million to sequence the tumor DNA of 1 million cancer patients in the next five years. The SoftBank-led megaround positions the cancer blood test pioneer to push ahead with the sequencing initiative while expanding globally and stepping up its early detection R&D program.

Redwood City, California-based Guardant will work toward the target of 1 million patients by increasing the commercial use of its tumor test Guardant360 and running studies at sites including M.D. Anderson, Forbes reports. Guardant will need to grow quickly to hit its target within five years. Since introducing the test in 2014, Guardant says it has been used by 3,000 oncologists to analyze more than 35,000 patient samples.

Guardant360 looks for 73 cancer genes in blood samples drawn from patients. Physicians use the results to identify the treatments and clinical trials best suited to the genetics of their patients. But for Guardant the data generated in these tests have wider-reaching implications.

We believe that conquering cancer is at its core a big-data problem, and researchers have been data starved, Guardant CEO Helmy Eltoukhy said in a statement. Every physician who orders one of our tests and every patient whose tumor DNA we sequence add to this larger mission by improving our understanding of this complex disease. With this ambitious five-year effort, we intend to accelerate this progress and provide a much-needed infusion of data into the field.

The therapeutic focus of Guardants program sets it apart from other sequencing initiatives. In 2016, AstraZeneca began working with J. Craig Venters Human Longevity to build a database of 2 million genome sequences. And in March, Regeneron stepped up its already sizable genomics program by teaming with GlaxoSmithKline and U.K. Biobank to sequence 500,000 samples. The big difference between the initiatives and Guardants is the latter is looking squarely at tumor DNA.

Guardant thinks such a concentration of data on the genetics of tumors will drive forward cancer care. In SoftBank, T. Rowe Price, Associates, Temasek, Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, OrbiMed and 8VC, Guardant has found investors willing to bankroll its vision and drive its lifetime fundraising haul up to $550 million. But some observers are more guarded.

I think its going to be difficult to interpret the data, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center oncologist Luis Diaz, M.D. told Forbes. But if they have individual cohorts in that data, that could yield productive information that could be great for the field. Diaz is the founder of another liquid biopsy business, Personal Genome Diagnostics.

Guardant will work toward the 1-million-tumor target in part by expanding globally. The company plans to set up a joint venture with SoftBank to commercialize Guardant360 in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, parts of the world with an estimated 7.8 million new cases of cancer a year.

Parallel to these activities, Guardant will expand an R&D program that could protect it from competitors in years to come. The Lunar project aims to improve early detection of cancer. In the first phase of the program, Guardant hopes to use its early detection technology to find evidence of residual disease in patients who have been treated for cancer. Such a test could contribute to a decline in recurrences of cancer.

The longer-term goal of the program is to create a test that detects early signs of cancer in healthy but high-risk patients. That goal puts Guardant on turf being staked out by Grail, the Illumina spinout that has raised $1 billion and hoovered up talent to develop a test for all types of cancer.

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Guardant gets $360M to sequence 1M cancer patients | FierceBiotech - FierceBiotech

DUBLIN, Ohio Cardinal Health namedJennifer Dawson, MHA, LSSBB, CPHQ, DLM (ASCP) SLS, QLC, QIHC, the 2017 recipient of its urEssential Award, which recognizes the essential contributions medical laboratory professionals make to patient care.

"Laboratory professionals work behind the scenes and away from the patients they serve, so their important contributions often go unrecognized; this is why the urEssential Award program aims to shine a spotlight on exceptional laboratory professionals," saidChris Kerski, SVP and GM of Laboratory Products at Cardinal Health. "As an advocate for quality and patient safety, Jennifer helps ensure laboratories in the U.S. and abroad achieve the standards necessary to provide exceptional patient care, and we're proud to honor her outstanding achievements."

In addition to national recognition for her contributions to quality programs in the clinical lab and beyond, Cardinal Health will provide a$25,000educational grant to the institution of higher learning of Dawson's choice. Dawson's grant will go toTexas State Universityto support students pursuing careers in clinical laboratory science.

"As a passionate advocate of the laboratory and its role in providing quality care and the highest level of patient safety, I'm humbled and honored to be recognized with this prestigious laboratory award," said Dawson. "I hope this spreads awareness of the impactful work being done by medical laboratory professionals and inspires others to pursue a career in this rewarding field."

Dawson is currently the senior director of Quality for Human Longevity inSan Diegoand affiliate faculty atRegis UniversityinDenver. Over the course of her career, she has developed or revamped quality programs for many laboratories, including building multiple labs and lab quality programs and providing consulting services.

This marks the fourth year for the Cardinal Health urEssential Award. Individuals working in the clinical laboratory profession may be nominated by their managers, colleagues, peers and students, or they may self-nominate. The award seeks to recognize clinical laboratory professionals who have improved their current (or former) laboratory, enhanced patient care through their work, and increased the awareness of the importance of the profession.

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Cardinal Health names 2017 urEssential Award winner - Drug Store News

SAN FRANCISCO -- The latest, most exclusive status symbol in Silicon Valley isn't a car, a coat, or a high-tech gadget. What everyone is clamoring for is immortality.

Now, a new health assessment is leading the way to give you precise information on how to lead the healthiest, longest lifepossible, CBS San Francisco reports.

Touting everything from cryotherapy to blood transfusions to digital devices, inventors and futurists are trying to harness science and technology toslow down aging and cheat death.

"I know there are a lot of people who are very, very curious or interested in the idea of extending human lifespan," said University of California, Berkeley assistant dean of journalism Kara Platoni.

"We want to conquer biological death specifically to stop and, hopefully, reverse aging," added entrepreneur and author Zoltan Istvan, whose novel "The Transhumanist Wager" envisions a radical future.

The latest addition to that effort is an exclusive new medical checkup offered by Health Nucleus of San Diego though it comes at a cost. It promises to help you cheat premature death for years, if not decades. The cost is $25,000 all out-of-pocket.

The company is part of Human Longevity Inc., founded by human genome pioneer Dr. J. Craig Venter.

"We want to find things early when they are treatable and preventable," Venter told KPIX 5 News. "What we're looking for is what's unique to each person and how that would predict their future."

The checkup begins with eight hours of diagnostic testing. It includes whole genome sequencing, as well as the sequencing of all your microbiota the germs both in and on your body.

It also includes a blood test that looks at 20 different chemicals, and extensive MRI body imaging that begins with the brain and uses very sophisticated software.

"We have an algorithm that measures very accurately 20 regions of the brain, can predict Alzheimer's disease 20 years in advance," Venter claimed.

So far, more than 500 people have signed up.

Venter says all presumed they were perfectly healthy. However, the exam showed they were not.

"Forty percent of those people you think are healthy, we're finding have serious disease, and 15 to 20 percent have something that needs to be acted upon almost immediately as a life-saving measure," he said.

One of those individuals included the genome pioneer himself. Venter's workup and whole genome sequencing revealed a hidden high-grade prostate cancer that he had surgically removed.

"We can really see the future," Venter said.

A single person's genome generates a huge amount of data: up to 100 gigabytes.

The company's ambitious goal is to decode 100,000 genomes every year, creating the world's largest clinical, biological, and behavioral database in the world, including comprehensive genomic and phenotype content.

That's where Silicon Valley, cloud computing and machine learning all come into play. "You have the computer look at that data and it can give you back an answer," said Human Longevity's Chief Data Scientist, Dr. David Heckerman.

In Mountain View, California, Heckerman and his team are using machine-learning super-computers to scour the details of all the data. They hope to uncover powerful new insights into your health.

"This is all a new world," said Heckerman. "We don't know where we are going to find things. But we're pretty sure we're going to find things."

The powerful computers will look at patterns in the genome along with clinical data, and see whether they can identify areas of vulnerabilities that may help to guide our future health decisions.

It's a body of immense knowledge that may potentially help all of us. However, some doctors are skeptical.

"I would save my money," said Dr. Rita Redberg, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco cardiologist. She believes testing otherwise healthy individuals preys upon their fears.

Redberg wants to see peer-reviewed published data before she would recommend this test for anyone. "Right now there is no data that getting this testing is going to make you feel better, make you healthier, or help you to live longer," said Redberg.

Moreover, numerous studies have documented the high cost and medical risks of unnecessary treatments resulting from false-positive test results.

That kind of criticism doesn't faze Venter.

"Some notable physicians complain about what we're doing and they consider it wrong to do tests on healthy people and my response to them is, how do you know that they are healthy?" he smiled.

Human Longevity is currently piloting a lower-cost, fewer-tests Health Nucleus product that it hopes to roll out later this year.

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High-tech medical venture aims to slow aging, cheat death - CBS News

While the average life expectancy has steadily increased since the 19th century, data from the International Database on Longevity showed that the age of the very oldest people on the planet appeared to plateau in the mid-1990s -- at a mere 114.9 years.

The grim reaper comes for everyone in the end, but sometimes he is in less of a rush. This was certainly true for Sodimedjo, an Indonesian man who died on Sunday, but whether he was the full 146 years he claimed remains doubtful -- not least because his purported birth date is 30 years before local birth records began.

Scientists have their own reasons to be sceptical. A study published last year pointed to the existence of an upper ceiling on the natural human lifespan.

While the average life expectancy has steadily increased since the 19th century, data from the International Database on Longevity showed that the age of the very oldest people on the planet appeared to plateau in the mid-1990s - at a mere 114.9 years. Since the apparent plateau happened at a time when the reservoir of healthy centenarians was expanding, scientists concluded that an intrinsic biological limit had been reached: even if you evade accidents and disease, your body will still steadily decline until it passes the point of no return, the data appeared to suggest.

Jan Vijg, a geneticist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, who led this research, said: We simply provided evidence that humans do indeed have a ceiling that they really cannot go beyond. Thats part of being human.

There will be the occasional outlier - the French supercentenarian and oldest woman to have lived, Jeanne Calment, was 122 when she died in 1997, but most of us have a shorter intrinsic shelf life. The probability of someone living to 146 is infinitessimal, Vijg said. If somebody told you that they saw a UFO yesterday but its gone now, youd probably be polite, but you wouldnt believe it, said Vijg. Thats my reaction with this story.

Before resigning yourself to the knowledge that you will almost certainly expire by the time you reach 115 years, it is worth noting that this ceiling could be moveable in the future.

Internal clock makes some people age faster and die younger - regardless of lifestyle.

Richard Faragher, professor of biogerontology at the University of Brighton, puts it this way: How long can a human live if you dont do anything to them? Probably around 120. But there is a separate question, how long do people last if you can do something to them?

Until now, the steady increase in average life expectancy (as distinct from lifespan) has been driven by fewer people smoking, better nutrition and antibiotics. Drugs and surgery for heart disease and cancer have also played a part.

However, scientists are only just beginning to explore the possibility of therapies designed to target the process of ageing itself, as well as the illnesses that come with advancing years. This field has recently taken an intriguing twist, as evidence has emerged that ageing is not simply the manifestation of environmental wear and tear. Instead, the latest work suggests that ageing is at least partly driven by an internal genetic clock that actively causes our cells and organs to grind to a halt.

This raises the intriguing possibility that ageing could be slowed or even reversed, and some animal studies have already claimed to do just this.

I wouldnt argue that the ceiling is unmoveable, said Vijg. But trying to say what the age limit is, science cant yet say, its predicting the future.

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Ageing: Scientists say human beings don't generally live beyond 120 years - Hindustan Times

Forbes

Why Isn't Business Preparing More For The Future Of Aging? Forbes In a booklet for his summit participants, the center's chairman Paul Irving wrote that the potential offered by human longevity is a transformational business opportunity. And yet, he added too few business leaders appreciate that population aging ... and more »

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Why Isn't Business Preparing More For The Future Of Aging? - Forbes