Projected job growth of 10 healthcare professions by 2029

 Healthcare employment is projected to grow 15 percent by 2029, adding about 2.4 million new jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The growth estimate is primarily attributed to an aging population and a greater demand for healthcare services, the bureau said.

Here is the bureau's projected job growth in 10 healthcare professions from 2019 to 2029: 

1. Physician assistants – 31 percent

2. Nurse anesthetists, nurse midwives and nurse practitioners – 45 percent

3. Medical assistants – 19 percent

4. Phlebotomists – 17 percent

5. Respiratory therapists – 19 percent

6. Registered nurses – 7 percent

7. Licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses – 9 percent

8. Clinical laboratory technologists and technicians – 7 percent

9. Nursing assistants and orderlies – 8 percent

10. Physicians and surgeons – 4 percent

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/workforce/projected-job-growth-of-10-healthcare-professions-by-2029.html

Breakdown of Google Health: 15 things leading up to division's dismantling

 Google has begun dissolving its health division as it looks to split its healthcare projects and teams across several areas of the company, Insider reported Aug. 20. 

The move comes as Google Health's chief, David Feinberg, MD, announced he would be joining Kansas City, Mo.-based EHR company Cerner in October as its new president and CEO. 

Here are 15 things to know about Google Health's business strategy and partnerships in 2021 so far, based on reports from Becker's Hospital Review. 

Leadership and strategy 

1. Google said Aug. 19 that it's dissolving hundreds of employees in its health division into existing divisions.

2. Dr. Feinberg, the vice president of Google Health, left the company after three years as its lead for the CEO position at Cerner, the company said Aug. 19.

3. Google Health had 700 employees but began moving more than 130 employees into other areas of the company, including Search and the newly acquired Fitbit group, Insider reported June 17.

4. Dr. Feinberg said at The Wall Street Journal's June 9 health tech conference that Google Health isn't concerned if its health venture can turn a profit. He said the division is focused on global impact and that even though the ventures are expensive, revenue is an afterthought.

5. In June, Google had an active job listing for the director's chief of staff at Google Health. The executive would work with Google's chief health officer to ensure operational success and strategy.

6. Google Health hired Charles DeShazer, MD, in March to be its director of clinical products. Dr. DeShazer previously served as the CMO at health insurer Highmark. At Google, his role will focus on the development of Care Studio, Google's EHR search tool pilot program.

Google partnerships with healthcare players 

7.  Researchers from Google Health, Naval Medical Center San Diego and The Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine in July developed an artificial intelligence model to predict breast cancer status and understand tumors better for treatment. 

8. HCA Healthcare inked a multiyear collaboration with Google Cloud in May focused on building a health data analytics platform to support the Nashville, Tenn.-based system's clinical and operational workflows.

9. In April, Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center joined the pilot of Google's Care Studio EHR search tool. 

10. Google announced plans to open its first office in Minnesota as part of its ongoing health partnership with Rochester-based Mayo Clinic, which the tech giant teamed up with in September 2019. The 10-year partnership focuses on cloud computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence work to advance the health system's healthcare innovation and virtual care initiatives. 

11. Google and St. Louis-based Ascension in February continued the collaboration they began in 2018 by rolling out a tool, dubbed Care Studio, to help clinicians better organize and search for patient information.

Google healthcare projects 

12. Verily, the healthcare and life sciences sister company of Google, said Aug. 5 it plans to launch a new AI research and development center in Israel. The center will focus on using AI to address issues and inefficiencies facing the medical field, with Verily picking up some of Google Health's projects, including the company's initiative exploring the use of AI in colorectal cancer screenings. 

13. YouTube launched an initiative to combat health misinformation, which had three main focuses: removing misinformation, reducing its spread and promoting credible sources of health information, it told Becker's in July. YouTube partnered with several leading healthcare providers to help populate its platform with credible health information, including Cleveland Clinic, Mass General Brigham, Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic, Stanford (Calif.) Medicine, and Kaiser Family Foundation. YouTube said it was moving away from a paternalistic approach to health information and toward a focus on patient engagement. 

14.  Google in April entered the early stages of a new project aiming to explore and develop a consumer-facing health records tool for Android users. Google did not directly partner with any healthcare organizations on the project, which could support the development of a medical records tool similar to Apple's Health Records app, according to STAT. 

15. Google paid $2.1 billion to acquire Fitbit, solidifying its advances to improve wearables. The deal was first announced Nov. 19 and concluded Jan. 14.

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/a-breakdown-of-google-health-in-2021-15-things-leading-up-to-division-s-dismantling.html

Oncology biotech Tyra Biosciences files for a $100 million IPO

 Tyra Biosciences, a preclinical biotech developing FGFR inhibitors for cancer, filed on Friday with the SEC to raise up to $100 million.

Tyra Biosciences is a precision oncology company focused on developing purpose-built therapies for tumor resistance. The company is using its proprietary SNÅP platform to generate next-generation candidates that are specifically designed to address acquired drug resistance and provide alternative treatment options. It is initially focused on developing a pipeline of selective inhibitors of the Fibroblast Growth Factor Receptor (FGFR) family. Its lead candidate, TYRA-300, is designed to selectively inhibit FGFR3, with an initial focus on patients with bladder cancer. Tyra anticipates filing an IND for TYRA-300 in mid-2022.

The Carlsbad, CA-based company was founded in 2018 and plans to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol TYRA. Tyra Biosciences filed confidentially on May 28, 2021. BofA Securities, Jefferies, and Cowen are the joint bookrunners on the deal. No pricing terms were disclosed.

Relevant Profile: TYRA

https://www.renaissancecapital.com/IPO-Center/News/85411/Oncology-biotech-Tyra-Biosciences-files-for-a-$100-million-IPO

Healthcare intelligence platform provider Definitive Healthcare files for a $100 million IPO

 Definitive Healthcare, which provides a SaaS platform to help healthcare companies commercialize, filed on Friday with the SEC to raise up to $100 million.

Definitive Healthcare states that it is a leading provider of healthcare commercial intelligence, offering a platform leveraged by functional groups including sales, marketing, clinical research and product development, strategy, talent acquisition, and physician network management. The company served over 2,600 customers as of June 30, 2021, which include biopharmaceutical and medical device companies, Healthcare Information Technology companies, healthcare providers, and other diversified companies seeking commercial success in the healthcare ecosystem.

The Framingham, MA-based company was founded in 2011 and booked $140 million in revenue for the 12 months ended June 30, 2021. It plans to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol DH. Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Credit Suisse, and Deutsche Bank are the joint bookrunners on the deal. No pricing terms were disclosed.

Relevant Profile: DH

https://www.renaissancecapital.com/IPO-Center/News/85424/Healthcare-intelligence-platform-provider-Definitive-Healthcare-files-for-a

EQRx Goes Public

 By Derek Lowe 

Early last year (in those retrospectively blissful pre-pandemic days) I wrote about a startup called EQRx, whose stated mission is to provide lower-cost alternatives to existing drugs. I did not find their business plans very convincing, since they seemed to me to involve some hand-waving steps about how much faster drug discovery these days, and I just didn’t (and don’t) see it. I was motivated enough to post this prediction on Longbets.org, for what it’s worth.

Now we have more news about the company. They are going public via a SPAC, a “special purpose acquisition company”. For those of you who don’t live in the stock market – not a bad choice, overall – SPACs have become very popular as of late, partly because there’s more investment money sluicing around than anyone quite knows what to do with. A SPAC itself is basically a pile of such money that has gone through an initial public offering, with the stated purpose being to acquire some other asset. But you don’t know what that asset is at the time of the IPO. SPACs generally have a two-year window to make such a move or return the money raised to investors, and the whole thing can be a bit reminiscent of the anecdote in Charles Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds“, with a purported handbill posted during the South Sea Bubble asking for funds for “a Company for carrying on an undertaking of Great Advantage but no one to know what it is“. Sadly, that one appears to be from a satire about the bubble published at the time (Mackay is not always a reliable source), but as usual, the satire and the reality are easy to confuse.

In this case, the SPAC is CM Life Sciences III, trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol CMLTU, that will fuse with EQRx in a deal that is expected to provide the company with up to 1.8 billion in capital. That’s what I mean about lots of investment money out there. I notice that the company’s original talk of screening and discovering new molecules seems to have faded out a bit – as detailed here, they now seem to be in the mood to acquire fast-follower compounds from other people, particularly companies in China. Is that going to work?

As that post correctly notes, that means that EQRx is taking lower-than-average scientific risk and offsetting that with higher-than-average commercial risk. The scientific risk is lower because they’re going into areas where their drug mechanisms are already proven to be useful, and because (at least for now) they’re not doing any of the fast-follower discovery work themselves, but rather letting someone else take care of that. But the commercial risk is higher, because they’re explicitly going to compete on price, and despite all the talk over the years about high drug prices, no one is sure if a company can make that work. Will these drugs truly be cheaper, and by how much? Will physicians prescribe them, and will insurance companies put pressure on people to do so? Right now, the two drugs that look to be the furthest along in this process are aumolertinib (an EGFR inhibitor from Hansoh Pharma that also shows up in the literature as almolertinib) and sugemalimab (a PD-L1 antibody from CStone).

The former is most likely to compete against AZ’s Tagrisso (osimertinib), as well it should, because it is an almost identical structure. Where the AZ compound has an N-methyl indole, EQRx’s compound has an N-cyclopropyl. This is not exactly a startling transformation. N-cyclopropyl for N-alkyl (particularly for N-methyl) is a classic medicinal chemistry move. What’s interesting is that AZ doesn’t seem to have covered this, and you’d think that everyone would after what happened 40 years ago with ciprofloxacin. That structure was covered generically by a SmithKline patent, but Bayer broke that in court by showing that the N-cyclopropyl was (1) unexpectedly more efficacious, that (2) SmithKline had not actually exemplified that analog nor “taught toward it” in the patent, and (3) that none of the chemical routes that they did disclose in the patent would actually produce it, either. This history prompted a former colleague of mine to say about aumolertinib that “If they get away with this, AZ’s lawyers should be shot“. I wouldn’t go that far, but if EQRx does actually take some real market share from AZ, they have only themselves to blame.

Meanwhile, sugemalimab will of course being going into the market that is dominated by Merck’s Keytruda (pembrolizumab), which is targeting PD-1 in the same general pathway. At the moment, there are four anti-PD-1 antibodies and three anti-PD-L1 antibodies approved in the US, and several more are on the way. Price competition will be a new factor, and no one’s sure how that will work out. Medicare, for example, operates under requirements to cover  “all or substantially all” drugs in oncology, and is also legally prohibited from negotiating on price. It will be the large private insurance companies that drive things here. But as that Dawn Bell post points out, insurance companies don’t have as much leverage as you might imagine, and the existing anti-PD-L1 antibody drugs have wider labeling indications because their makers have put in the work in the clinic to extend these. Sugemalimab will have data on non-small-cell lung cancer, but it’ll cost more time and money to get more indications approved. Taken together, the real-world market for the drug may be smaller than it appears. We shall see. The two other compounds that EQRx has disclosed as being in their pipeline are leociclib (a CDK4/6 inhibitor) and EQ-176, formerly CS1003, an anti-PD-1 antibody also from CStone. The same considerations apply to both of these.

My earlier objections to the company’s plans were driven by all their hype around computation and outsourced synthesis, which seemed (and seems) rather crazy to me. Their CEO’s quote at the time was “The world has fundamentally changed. . .Today, you can do a virtual screen of a billion compounds, do on-demand synthesis of all of those, and you can do it overnight in the cloud. . .” and I wasn’t having it. Now that I see that the plan is to snarf up all the fifth-, sixth-, eighth- and tenth-to-market compounds that they can find from other small companies, it seems marginally more feasible, but only marginally. There are two more questions that have to come up. First, how many Chinese-sourced follow-on compounds are there waiting to be licensed in? I have no idea myself, but I would be surprised if there were enough of them for EQRx to fill out its aspirational pipeline that way. They are apparently saying that they will have 22 candidates in that pipeline by next year, and I will watch that with interest.

Second, now that they’re a public company, will the shareholders stay on board with the “low, low prices” strategy? The pitch will be that they’re trading price for market share, but the balance between those two is going to be pretty empirical, isn’t it? It seems to me that the management will have to make a strong case that they’re not leaving money on the table. For all their talk of changing the US healthcare market, I’m pretty sure that “EQRx: Making Less Money Than We Otherwise Could” could be a hard slogan to sell.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/08/10/eqrx-goes-public

Praxis Precision Medicines Corporate Update, Q2 Results

 Initiated PRAX-114 Phase 2 Acapella Study for adjunctive treatment of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD)

Enrollment on track for 1H22 topline results in PRAX-114 Phase 2/3 Aria Study for monotherapy treatment of MDD

PRAX-114 to advance in Phase 2b study in women with menopausal and mood symptoms

PRAX-944 Phase 2b study for treatment of essential tremor to initiate in 3Q21; Phase 2a topline results expected by the end of 2021

PRAX-562 Phase 1 healthy volunteer study completed with dose up to 150 mg and favorable safety profile

Cash and investments of $339.2 million as of June 30, 2021 supports runway into 2Q23

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/praxis-precision-medicines-provides-corporate-120000136.html

Can isometric resistance training safely reduce high blood pressure?

 When was the last time you had your blood pressure checked? High blood pressure affects 1.13 billion people around the globe and in 2019, it accounted for 10.8 million deaths. Worldwide, it's the leading risk factor for mortality. More than a third of the Australian population over the age of 18 has high blood pressure, yet it's estimated 50 per cent of Australians don't realise they're living with it.

As high blood pressure puts you at high risk of having a heart attack or stroke (cardiovascular disease), it's important to keep track of your blood pressure. People over the age of 18 are advised to have a blood pressure check at least every two years.

Given the impact of this global health challenge, there is a clear need for strategies to reduce the prevalence and severity of high blood pressure, and exercise is one such strategy. While aerobic and dynamic resistance exercise appear effective at reducing blood pressure, a new study led by UNSW Medicine & Health researchers has revealed isometric resistance training (IRT) as an emerging mode of exercise demonstrating effectiveness in reducing office blood pressure. Office blood pressure refers to your pressure when taken during a GP visit, for example. It is taken at one time-period, usually when you're sitting down.

What is isometric resistance training?

IRT is a type of strength training. During IRT, the muscles produce force but do not change length. For example, pushing against a wall or holding a 'plank'. This is different to more traditional strength training like a squat or a push up or where muscles shorten and lengthen during the movement.

Currently, IRT is not recommended by several international guidelines for the management of high blood pressure. This was mostly due to concerns over its safety because the static nature of IRT causes blood pressure to increase markedly during exercise, particularly when performed using large muscle groups or at high intensity, compared to traditional strength exercise such as lifting weights or aerobic exercise such as walking or cycling.

However, lead authors of the study Mr Harrison Hansford and Dr Matthew Jones, both accredited exercise physiologists at the School of Health Sciences said their research showed IRT to be safe.

"We were interested in how IRT reduced blood pressure in people with high blood pressure. We also wanted to know whether IRT was safe. We found that IRT was very safe and caused meaningful changes in blood pressure -- almost as much as what you'd expect to see with blood pressure lowering medications," explained Dr Jones.

He said exercise is important for the management of high blood pressure, but the researchers acknowledged many Australians were physically inactive, with 'lack of time' commonly cited as a reason.

"IRT is a time-efficient means of reducing blood pressure, needing only 12 minutes a day, two to three days per week to produce the effects we found in our review."

"While the studies included in our review normally used a specialised handgrip device, it's possible we would see the same effects simply by asking participants to make a fist and squeeze it at a certain intensity for the prescribed amount of time. This means IRT could easily be performed while participants are sitting down watching TV," said Dr Jones.

"We also found IRT caused improvements in other measures of blood pressure including central blood pressure (the pressure in the heart's largest artery -- the aorta, and an important predictor of cardiovascular disease) and to a lesser extent ambulatory blood pressure (average blood pressure across a 24-hour period), neither of which had previously been reviewed."

Although previous studies had shown IRT as being effective for lowering office blood pressure, the studies had not comprehensively examined the safety of IRT.

IRT is accessible and easy to perform

Dr Jones said IRT is a very accessible and easy to perform intervention. He highlighted how exciting it was to know such a simple intervention could have such a strong effect on reducing blood pressure -- the leading risk factor for mortality, globally.

"It's particularly exciting for people who may have difficulty performing more 'traditional' exercise such as walking, cycling or strength training knowing they have another exercise type in their toolkit to help manage their high blood pressure."

Dr Jones noted the research team were surprised there were not increased risks of adverse events in older adults.

"In fact, there were actually lower rates of adverse events in older adults, making it a very appealing mode of exercise, especially in those with mobility restrictions who may not be able to do other exercises like aerobic or dynamic resistance training."

Dr Jones acknowledged research limitations in terms of the studies included in the scientific literature review, which were not always of 'high quality'. This means the research team cannot be entirely confident in their results. Dr Jones also acknowledged relatively few studies examined lower body IRT, or IRT using different doses and intensities. Therefore, it is still unclear how different types and doses of IRT may affect results, and whether these would also be safe.

"There is a clear need for a large, high-quality randomised controlled trials to better assess the effect of IRT on blood pressure. To conduct such a study would be a clear goal for the future. It would also be useful to study how different types and doses of IRT affect results, and whether this differs between males and females, so this would also be a goal of future research."

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Story Source:

Materials provided by University of New South Wales. Original written by Emi Berry. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Harrison J. Hansford, Belinda J. Parmenter, Kelly A. McLeod, Michael A. Wewege, Neil A. Smart, Aletta E. Schutte, Matthew D. Jones. The effectiveness and safety of isometric resistance training for adults with high blood pressure: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Hypertension Research, 2021; DOI: 10.1038/s41440-021-00720-3

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/08/210820111120.htm