Cambridge covid rules require face masks AND social distancing–even on Fresh Pond

For some unfathomable reason, in the Peoples’ Republic, folks either do not know or do not care that the city’s covid rules now require both face masks AND social distancing, even in parks like Fresh Pond–with a possible $300 fine.

Running on Fresh Pond this morning before 7 a.m., I found that many people were respecting the order, but several runners ignored the requirement.

Social Distancing
A couple with white hair insisted on staying two abreast in the center of the path, refusing to budge when I asked them for some distance. They went so far as to tell me both that I should not have stopped on the path and that I should walk slower, until they got ahead of me. I am usually mild-mannered, but I confess, I lost it–resorting to the F-bomb–before I turned and sped up my pace in hopes of out-distancing them.

When I asked another woman –nicely–for some distance, she laughed at me .

Masks
When I reminded a twenty-something couple that masks are required, they ignored me; when I asked if they knew they could be subject to the $300 fine, the guy told me I should be heading clockwise. True, that’s a guideline, but it’s not a requirement, because not everyone goes all the way around the pond. I said, “I can’t make it all the way around.” He said, “That’s not our problem.”

Soon after that, I ran into a dog friend I’ve nicknamed “Smiley.” His human asked me how I was doing; I mentioned some of the above. She said she goes out even before 6:30 because “After 7, it’s too anxiety provoking. ” She added, “I don’t understand why people won’t help; we’re all in this together.”

I don’t “get it,” either. Yesterday, I asked a man, his wife with baby carriage and two children–none wearing masks– for some distance; they refused to move. He said, “I have a mask.” True….he did have a bandana, but it was around his neck. One day last week, when I reminded a runner (less than 6″ away) that masks are required, he called me a M’fucker. Also last week, a guy walking with his kids in Central Square pulled a knife on a runner who was not wearing a mask.

I’m very concerned about divisiveness and anger that’s plaguing our neighborhood, our city, and our country….but having lost a close friend to the virus, and nearly lost another, I find it difficult to keep calm..and to keep my mouth shut. I go outside a couple of times a day to relieve stress during this difficult pandemic; it’s not working!

Anyway, in case you have’t seem the new regulation, here it is:

Cambridge Face Covering Order

The City of Cambridge issued an emergency order requiring that face coverings be worn in all public places, businesses and common areas of residential buildings. The order takes effect at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, April 29, and applies to everyone over the age of five years old, with exceptions in alignment with guidelines provided by the Centers for Disease Control or Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Violations may be punishable by a $300 fine.

“While we are grateful to those in Cambridge who have been heeding our previous mask advisory and taking this issue seriously, we are concerned about the number of residents who continue to shop, walk, run and bike throughout the city without proper face coverings,” said Mayor Siddiqui and City Manager DePasquale in a joint statement. “We must all do our part in flattening the curve and make sure we are preventing the further spread of COVID-19. This mandate emphasizes the importance of wearing a face covering, not as an option, but as a requirement in our effort to combat this pandemic together.”

The order applies to everyone over five years old “without limitation, when on, in or about” public places, defined as:

Sidewalks
Streets
Parks
Plazas
Bus stops
Non-residential parking lots and garages
Any other outdoor area or non-residential parking facility which is open and accessible to the general public.

The mask requirement also applies to anyone working in or visiting an essential business, as well as shoppers and consumers. Masks must remain on throughout shifts or visits to those businesses. The businesses covered under the order, include:

Grocery stores or supermarkets
Pharmacies
Laundromats
Dry cleaners
Hardware stores
Restaurants, cafes or similar establishments where prepared foods, meals or beverages may be purchased
Local government buildings
Commercial office buildings
All essential businesses defined in Governor Baker’s March 23, 2020 Executive Order

In residential buildings of two or more units when people cannot maintain a 6 foot distance, masks will be required prior to entering any common area, including:

Lobbies
Hallways
Elevators
Stairwells
Laundry rooms
Garages or parking lots
Walkways
Yards and other outdoor common areas
Mailrooms and other indoor common areas

–Anita M. Harris
Anita Harris is the founder of the Harris Communications Group, and the author of Ithaca Diaries and Broken Patterns: Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity.

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, a PR and digital marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA.

Can Digital Innovation Transform Health Care? Part I

Imagine this: a city homeless shelter serves breakfast and dinner, but not lunch. Hungry residents regularly go to the fire station next door, complain of chest pain, get taken by ambulance to the hospital ER where they are evaluated, at high cost, given lunch, and then transported back to the homeless shelter in time for dinner.

Such was a scenario laid out recently at the MIT Sloan School as an example from an inefficient US social and health care system that cannot adequately keep track of patients, manage health of the poor, or control costs.

The scenario was described by Jason Helgerson, Medicaid Director for the New York State Health Department, at a day-long conference entitled “Health Systems Innovation.” At the November 29 conference, experts from industry, government, science, medicine and academe laid out some of US health care’s daunting problems, along with new visions and hoped-for solutions —many powered by digital innovation.

In introducing the sessions, which were organized by the MIT Sloan Initiative for Health Systems Innovation (HSI), moderator Jay Levine pointed out that, today, there is more uncertainty regarding health care than at any time since the enactment of Medicare in 1965—a result of “overwhelming” political turbulence and concerns about health insurance and a tax plan that could upend the health industry and lead to huge, unsustainable losses in health delivery. Levine is retired principal of ECG Management Consultants, Inc.

Retzef Levi, an MIT/Sloan management professor whose department hosts HSI, outlined burgeoning health issues that accompany an aging US population. He emphasized the need to “sow seeds now” for a “visionary, futuristic system” to prevent disease and know who is at risk in order to reduce future illness.

Such a system would integrate local, state, and national systems, medical and behavioral disciplines, primary, specialty and community care, Retsef said. Providers would be paid for performance rather than tasks undertaken. There would be a workforce sufficient to handle the nation’s long term care needs, personalize diagnosis and treatment. The system would make full use of digital health innovations such as big data, analytics, sophisticated devices and mobile apps without losing the best aspects of human care.

After Levi’s remarks, Levine asked, “ in light of huge current losses in the system, where does the money come from to fix it?”

Panelists at the day long meeting never fully answered that question, but they did lay out a variety of promising digital approaches that could lead toward transformation, as well as roadblocks to change.

Analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence
In a panel on “Machine Learning in surgery and cancer”, MIT PhD Candidates Jack Dunn and Daisy Zhou described analytic tools, based largely on longitudinal patient records, that they are developing to predict how long an individual surgical patient is likely to live, with what quality of life, if certain decisions are made. Such tools, which evaluate “nuanced “ signals and make use of “decision trees,” are aimed at helping doctors decide on treatment plans. Under current treatment guidelines, Zhou said, many doctors tend to “overestimate” prognoses, which can diminish patients’ quality of life and increase medical costs.

Dusty Mojumdar, PhD, IBM vice president and chief marketing officer for an IBM artificial intelligence (AI) system that reads, learns, understands and interacts with humans. Named “Watson,” after IBM’s first president, Thomas Watson, the system is now used, in health care, to: combat a major shortage of radiologists; predict whether nodules on individuals’ lungs will become malignant; develop new targets for ALS drugs, predict hypoglycemic events for diabetics; rank treatment plans and options for seven cancers, and match patients to clinical trials.

Artificial intelligence is also being used to evaluate what one speaker termed an “explosion “of health data—which is reported in some 7000 new health care publications per day, and which doubles every 73 days, according to Mojumdar. Several massive health systems are employing artificial intelligence to co-ordinate electronic medical records—using “text analysis” and “pattern matching” to “catalog” patients with similar health conditions in order to evaluate and predict outcomes of particular treatments.

In September, IBM made a 10-year, $240 million investment to create the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab to carry out fundamental AI research aimed at propelling scientific breakthroughs that unlock the potential of AI.

In Part II, I’ll share panelists’ information about a variety of digital devices and methods already in use to help streamline and personalize long-term care and health care delivery.

LINKS TO:
Part I Overview, Watson, analytics
Part II digital devices, long term care.
Part III Apps, devices, roadblocks

Videotapes and photos of the conference, held November 29, 2017, are available at http://mitsloan.mit.edu/alumni/events/2017-cambridge-health-conference/

–Anita M. Harris
Anita Harris is a writer and communications consultant specializing in health, science and technology.

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, a content, PR and digital marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA.

Convergence Science Transforming Biomedicine, MIT Report says

We thought our readers would like to know about “Convergence and the Future of Health,” a report released today by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Slightly self-serving full disclosure: New Cambridge Observer‘s Anita Harris was one of the writers).

MIT Graphic, Convergence Report 2016

CAMBRIDGE, MA — What if lost limbs could be regrown? Cancers detected early with blood or urine tests, instead of invasive biopsies? Drugs delivered via nanoparticles to specific tissues or even cells, minimizing unwanted side effects? While such breakthroughs may sound futuristic, scientists are already exploring these and other promising techniques.

But the realization of these transformative advances is not guaranteed. The key to bringing them to fruition, a landmark new report argues, will be strategic and sustained support for “convergence”: the merging of approaches and insights from historically distinct disciplines such as engineering, physics, computer science, chemistry, mathematics, and the life sciences.

The report, “Convergence: The Future of Health,” was co-chaired by Tyler Jacks, the David H. Koch Professor of Biology and director of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research; Susan Hockfield, noted neuroscientist and president emerita of MIT; and Phillip Sharp, Institute Professor at MIT and Nobel laureate, and will be presented at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington on June 24.

The report, available at http://www.convergencerevolution.net/2016-report draws on insights from several dozen expert participants at two workshops, as well as input from scientists and researchers across academia, industry, and government. Their efforts have produced a wide range of recommendations for advancing convergence research, but the report emphasizes one critical barrier above all: the shortage of federal funding for convergence fields.

“Convergence science has advanced across many fronts, from nanotechnology to regenerative tissue,” says Sharp. “Although the promise has been recognized, the funding allocated for convergence research in biomedical science is small and needs to be expanded. In fact, there is no federal agency with the responsibility to fund convergence in biomedical research.”

National Insitutes of Health

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) are the primary source of research funding for biomedical science in the United States. In 2015, only 3 percent of all principal investigators funded by NIH were from departments of engineering, bioengineering, physics, biophysics, or mathematics. Accordingly, the report’s authors call for increasing NIH funding for convergence research to at least 20 percent of the agency’s budget.

Progress and potential

In 2011, MIT released a white paper that outlined the concept of convergence. More than just interdisciplinary research, convergence entails the active integration of these diverse modes of inquiry into a unified pursuit of advances that will transform health and other sectors, from agriculture to energy.

The new report lays out a more comprehensive vision of what convergence-based research could achieve, as well as the concrete steps required to enable these advances.

“The 2011 report argued that convergence was the next revolution in health research, following molecular biology and genomics,” says Jacks. “That report helped identify the importance and growing centrality of convergence for health research. This report is different. It starts us off on a true strategy for convergence-based research in health.”

The report released today makes clear that, despite such obstacles, this “third revolution” is already well underway. Convergence-based research has become standard practice at MIT, most notably at the Koch Institute and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science.

“About a third of all MIT engineers are involved in some aspect of convergence,” says Sharp. “These faculty are having an enormous impact on biomedical science and this will only grow in the future. Other universities are beginning to evolve along similar paths.”

Indeed, convergence-based approaches are becoming more common at many other pioneering university programs, including the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, and the University of Chicago’s new Institute for Molecular Engineering, among others.

The report also points to several new federal initiatives that are harnessing the convergence research model to solve some of society’s most pressing health challenges.

For example, the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, launched by the Obama administration in 2013, seeks to improve our understanding of how individual cells and neural circuits interact, in order to develop new ways to treat and prevent brain disorders. And the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative, launched earlier this year to accelerate research to develop cancer vaccines and early detection methods and genomic tumor analysis, will also operate largely using convergence tools and approaches.

But the integration of new technologies and methods from genomics, information science, nanotechnology, and molecular biology could take us even farther.

The report outlines three major disease areas — brain disorders, infectious diseases and immunology, and cancer — and promising convergence-based approaches to tackling them. It also presents case studies of four emerging technology categories: advanced imaging in the body, nanotechnology for drug and therapy delivery, regenerative engineering, and big data and health information technology.

A sampling gives a sense of their transformative potential. Convergence techniques could enable rewiring the genes of mosquitoes to eliminate Zika, dengue, and malaria. They could help solve the emerging threat of drug-resistant bacterial strains, which infect over two million people in the U.S. every year. Convergence-based immunotherapy could activate a person’s immune system to fight cancer, reprogramming a person’s T-cells or antibodies to find and attack tumor cells. Big-data techniques could be used to generate and analyze huge amounts of data on people’s exposures to industrial chemicals, environmental toxins, and infectious agents, creating a new field of “chemistry of nurture,” to complement the “chemistry of nature” developed by the documentation of the human genome.

“Convergence might come just in time,” says Hockfield, “given our rapidly aging population, increasing levels of chronic disease, and mounting healthcare costs due to demographic trends throughout the developed world. But we must overcome significant barriers to get to convergence.”

Cultivating convergence

Realizing the full potential of the convergence revolution will require much more ambitious and strategic coordination and collaboration across industry, government, and academia, the report argues.

The report accordingly calls for a concerted joint effort by federal agencies, universities, and industry to develop a new strategic roadmap to support convergence-based research. As a concrete next step, the report’s authors recommend establishing an interagency working group on convergence with participation from NIH, the National Science Foundation, and other federal agencies involved in funding scientific research, such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Energy.

Other pressing challenges include grant review processes based on narrow, outdated disciplinary structures, which limit the availability of resources for cross-functional research teams. The report also proposes new practices to foster “cultures of convergence” within academic institutions: cross-department hiring and tenure review, convergence “cluster hiring” and career grants, and new PhD programs wherein students design their own degree programs across disciplinary boundaries.

If the potential of convergence is great, so are the stakes.

“Convergence has grown from a little seedling to a sprouting plant, but to become a great tree and orchard yielding fruit for decades into the future, it needs to be nourished, expanded, and cultivated now,” says Sharp. “Students need to be educated, collaborations need to be encouraged, and resources need to be committed to make sure convergence thrives.”

“This integration is important to deal with the great challenges of the future: continued growth in the accessibility and quality of healthcare, growth of the economy, and providing resources for future populations.”

Funding for the report was provided by the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Foundation, The Kavli Foundation, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

The report is available at http://www.convergencerevolution.net/2016-report

###

Written by Jonathan Mingle, MIT News correspondent

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, a Cambridge, MA, PR & marketing firm specializing in health, science and technology.

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Healthbox expands to Cambridge; $50K health tech startup competition deadline is June 24.

Chicago-based Healthbox is now accepting applications for a new, $50,000 three-month health tech business accelerator program to start August 13, in Cambridge.

In the program, up to ten selected New England-based companies will receive: $50,000 in seed capital; collaborative workspace; access to a mentor network of industry experts and strategic guidance, according to Dan Phillips, a director of Sandbox Industries, Healthbox’ parent company, who attended Venture Cafe in the Cambridge Innovation Center last week. The program will conclude with a high-profile conference in November at which each participant will pitch to an audience of investors and healthcare leaders from across the country.

Healthbox is one of the first business accelerator programs in the healthcare industry to support a platform for innovation among seed-stage companies, according to the Sandbox Website.

“Massachusetts’ world-renowned academic institutions, cutting-edge provider systems and strong investor community make it an ideal location for a healthcare accelerator to stimulate the ecosystem and support new ideas,” said Healthbox founder Nina Sharif, in a press release. “We are looking forward to working with New England’s most promising healthcare entrepreneurs to help them gain traction in the industry and develop sustainable businesses.”

Massachusetts Blue Cross Blue Shield Venture Funds will be among those providing financial support for the Cambridge program, according to Ryan Boxill of the BCBSMA Finance Development Program.

Earlier this year, Healthbox hosted its first program in Chicago. According to a company press release, ten healthcare technology startups were selected from hundreds of applicants and, within three months, the teams were able to evolve their business models and establish new partnerships and pilots. The program was supported by strategic partners including Boston-based HLM Venture Partners; Ascension Health; BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners; California HealthCare Foundation; Merge Healthcare; Merrick Ventures; Sandbox Industries and Walgreens.

David Nichols of CareWire, a Minnesota-based company that participated in the Healthbox Chicago program said: “This program has helped us really focus in on our core value, rapidly test assumptions and launch pilots with new customers.”

Mark Hall, the CEO of New Jersey-based United Preference, another Healthbox Chicago participant, added “Things that take 6 months or 12 months in other environments, we’ve been able to achieve in 2 to 4 weeks here.”

According to its Website, Sandbox Industries creates, invests in and explores new businesses that it believes could change markets. Through a new model of business development that “helps rather than harass entrepreneurs,” it aims to “grow successful companies through collaboration and knowledge sharing…redefining the way great ideas are generated and transformed into successful companies.”

Applications are currently being accepted on the Healthbox website at www.healthboxaccelerator.com/apply. For information and announcements about the program, visit www.healthboxaccelerator.com and follow the Twitter feed – @health_box

—Anita M. Harris

Anita Harris is a writer and journalist based at the Cambridge Innovation Center in Kendall Square, Cambridge.

Bio-IT World Review: BIG Data; BIG Promise; BIG CHALLENGES.

Earlier this week, I had the privilege of attending the tenth annual “BIO-IT World Conference and Expo,” at which some 2500 information technology professionals participated in a 12-track program featuring more than 200 presentations on scientific and technologic developments.

From keynote speakers Jill Mesirov, PhD, and Martin Leach, PhD, respectively the Associate Director and Chief Information Officer of the Harvard-MIT Broad Institute, I learned that exponential increases in computing power promise to bring personalized medicine –allowing highly individualized diagnosis and treatment –to doctors offices within ten years. I also learned how hard it is to keep track of the petabytes ( a PBs is a unit of information equal to one quadrillion bytes, or 1024 terabytes ) used to keep it all going.

Mesirov announced the upcoming launch of “Genome Space“–a new Web-based technology to help scientists make sense of and collaborate in using such data.

And in a talk entitled “BIG,” Leach described the difficulty of defining “big data,” because the amount of available information is growing so rapidly. He described an event held recently at the Broad to celebrate the Institute’s ability to store and analyze ten pedabytes of data –his glee soon tempered by his recollection that in 1993, NIH’s Institute of Medicine was thrilled with its ability store 16 gigabytes–which anyone can now do on a cell phone.

Today, Leach said, we are seeing “increasing big data with a decreasing footprint.” [that is, smaller systems needed for gathering and retrieval].

Mentioning that he has an autistic son and would like to be able to figure out what causes the disorder, Leach asked, “Why is there no Google search for data, no way to access thousands of data repositories?

“We need a new application ecosystem and a breed of data scientist who knows how and where to push this data, ” he said. He predicted that there will soon be 50 thousand jobs in the “big data” arena.

In the exhibit hall, I was pleased to see that see that Wingu, headquartered in the Cambridge Innovation Center, where I work, had been nominated for a best of show award for its pharmaceutical, contract research and academic collaboration software.

The winners, announced last night, were Recentris, Opscode, Clear Trial, and Cambridge Semantics. [More info at http://www.bio-itworld.com/2012/04/26/2012-best-of-show-winners.html]. Best Practice Grand Prizes went to big Pharma: Merck, Pfizer, and Merck KGaA (Germany) went to and two genomics organizations, BGI Shenzhen and the University of Utah/Omicia. http://www.bio-itworld.com/2012/04/25/bio-it-world-announces-winners-2012-best-practices-awards.html.

BIO-IT World is sponsored by Insight Pharma Reports, Samsung, and the Portland Group. It runs through April 27, 2012.

—Anita M. Harris

Broad Institute Launches Collaborative Genomics “Cloud” Tool for Scientists ,

In an effort to harness and allow sharing of exponentially-developing genetic data, the Broad Institute will launch “Genome Space,”–a co-operative Web based tool aimed at “frictionless” data transfer, later this week.

So said Jill Merisov, PhD, the Broad’s associate director and Chief Informatics officer, in a keynote speech at the opening of the Bio-IT World conference yesterday, in Boston. The Broad is a Harvard-MIT research center located in Kendall Square, Cambridge.

In her talk, Merisov pointed out that just ten years ago, scientists announced that they had identified all of the genes present in human beings. Since then, researchers have discovered 30 million genetic variations among 1000 different individuals, 3000 genetically-related disease traits, and a multitude of cancer types. Such findings are now being used to determine the genetic bases of many diseases, to develop treatments for those diseases, and to determine for which patients particular treatments are likely to be effective. In another ten years, she said, such “personalized medicine” will be commonly used by doctors, in clinics.

These advances are due in large part to less expensive, increasingly sophisticated and sensitive computer technologies that have led to an “explosion” of data , to less “noisy” data, and to new, international ways of reviewing the data, Merisov explained. Scientists can now buy the technology and carry out sequencing in their own labs and “”computing is now integral to every aspect of biomedical research.”

But these developments also mean that there are now seven-to-ten thousand bioinformatics tools available for download on the Web and five thousand databases–many of which are “out of reach” for scientists who do not have sophisticated programming skills.

The new tool “bridges the gaps between bioinformatics tools, making it possible for [scientists ] to move data smoothly between these tools, leveraging the available analyses and visualizations in each of these tools,” according to the Genome Space Web site.

Genome Space also allows for data storage in the Amazon cloud [a computing platform of Amazon.com] and “provides necessary file format transformations whenever a scientists selects an analysis or visualization within one of the tools.

The GenomeSpace project is a collaboration of the Mesirov and Regev laboratories at the Broad Institute; the Chang laboratory at Stanford University; the Ideker laboratory at the University of California, San Diego; the Nekrutenko laboratory at Pennsylvania State University; the Segal laboratory at the Weizmann Institute of Science; and the Haussler and Kent laboratories at the University of California, Santa Cruz. GenomeSpace is funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute, with additional support from Amazon Web Services, according to the Genome Space Web site.

The Bio-IT Conference Expo 2012 goes through April 26.

–Anita M. Harris