Chris Levi and his nieces Hannah and Ava.Brian Zak
Financial adviser and retired Army Cpl. Chris Levi finally has a home that he’s truly comfortable in.
In early July, the 35-year-old — who lost both of his legs and sustained damage to his right hand following an explosion in Iraq in 2008 — moved into a 2,800-square-foot, single-story, three-bedroom house in Melville, NY, that’s equipped with a number of hi-tech features designed for his limited mobility. It’s a big upgrade from his previous split-level Long Island home, where performing everyday tasks was difficult and made him feel isolated.
‘These little subtleties give [Levi] back that independence he hasn’t had in many years’
“I still feel like I’m in the honeymoon phase,” says Levi of his new home, which he shares with his 2- and 4-year-old nieces, Ava and Hannah, and his mother, Debra. Levi happily describes his new pad’s features, which include remote-controlled blinds, a toilet whose lid automatically lifts when he approaches and a stovetop that automatically lowers to a seated level, allowing him to safely cook.“If you’re in a wheelchair and you want to use the front burners safely, you need to be able to reach them,” says Levi, who uses both a wheelchair and prosthetic legs.
Smart-home technology, typically regarded as a bonus in pricey luxury homes, is increasingly being employed by people with physical disabilities who want to navigate their homes with greater ease.
“These little subtleties give [Levi] back that independence he hasn’t had in many years,” says Frank Siller, CEO of the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation, a nonprofit that, along with the Home Depot Foundation, financed Levi’s home.
That’s a sentiment that’s echoed by Dutchess County resident Stephen Valyou, 42, who’s lived in a Stephen Siller foundation-built smart home since 2016. Chris Levi’s stove automatically lowers for him.Brian Zak“Overall, it’s had a huge impact with independence,” says Valyou, an Army veteran who was left paralyzed from the belly button down after being shot by a sniper in Iraq in 2007.
The 2,856-square-foot home that Valyou shares with his 13-year-old son, Nathaniel, and 5-year-old daughter, Ashlynn, has doors that swing open automatically so he can pass through easily in his wheelchair. If he’s in bed and forgot to turn off the lights in another room, he can do so from his phone without getting back in his wheelchair. He also has security cameras that let him see, though his phone, who’s pulling into the driveway before he can get to the door.
“[Before, I’d] sit there and struggle before [asking for help] … Now there’s not much that I can really come up with that I have to ask for,” he says.
Not all newly constructed smart homes for the disabled come from charity initiatives. Roosevelt Island resident Torsten Gross, 39, is financing his smart home himself — but the payoff is just as great.
“[Having the technology] means that how I use the space doesn’t have to be different than the way anyone else would,” says Gross, who’s constructing a tech-heavy home in Sharon, Conn., that he and wife Maggie, 33, will use as a second house.
Gross, who works in advertising in Manhattan, has been paralyzed from the chest down, with some use of his fingers, since age 15 — when he broke his neck during a shallow-water dive while on vacation in the Bahamas.
In his new home, he will be able to adjust the lights and shades with just his voice or an app on his phone. Even better, the doors will automatically lock whenever he leaves and unlock when he arrives, great because Gross has difficulty grabbing door handles. Torsten Gross outside the new home he’s building in ConnecticutCourtesy of Torsten Gross“This equalizes it for me,” says Gross.
Dolf Radeljic, a now-retired construction worker who was left paralyzed from the navel down after falling 10 feet into an elevator shaft at a Manhattan job site, will likely spend $50,000 to $100,000 of his own money to retrofit his 4,500-square-foot Rockland County residence.
In the coming months, Radeljic — with the help of local chain Total Home Technologies — plans to install an advanced Control4 automation system (parts from $600) at his home, which he shares with his wife, Donna. Instead of reaching several feet from his wheelchair to adjust the air conditioning, he’ll be able to control the temperature with his voice — or with a phone, remotes and wall keypads. Same goes for raising and lowering the blinds — a task made difficult by his wheelchair not being able to fit into the tight crannies where the drawstrings hang.
“It gives me a lot more independence — just the fact that I would be able to control a lot of the things that my wife usually does for me,” he says.
Even without a huge budget, it’s possible to make big improvements.
Bronx resident Jose Hernandez, a 37-year-old quadriplegic left paralyzed at age 15 after diving into shallow water, says it only cost him $250 initially to get his smart features —including an Amazon Echo ($99.99), which he’s customized to let him control his air conditioner, his television and make phone calls hands-free, and a Phillips hue kit (starting at $34.99) for lighting control.
“It adds a level of safety that I didn’t have before,” says Hernandez, a program specialist for the United Spinal Association.
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The prevalence of Lyme disease is increasing in the United States, spiking significantly between 2016 and 2017, and has spread to all 50 United States and the District of Columbia, according to a new study released today by Quest Diagnostics(NYSE: DGX).
Based on more than six million de-identified laboratory test results conducted over the past seven years, the Quest Diagnostics study also found that outside of the northeastern U.S. which is historically associated with Lyme disease, California and Florida saw the largest absolute increases in positive test results. California found 483 infected patients in 2017, a 194.5 percent increase over 2015 levels. Florida found 501 infected patients in 2017, a 77 percent increase over 2015 levels.
“Lyme disease is a bigger risk to more people in the United States than ever before,” said Harvey W. Kaufman, M.D., senior medical director for Quest Diagnostics and head of the company’s Health Trends research program. “Our data show that positive results for Lyme are both increasing in number and occurring in geographic areas not historically associated with the disease. We hypothesize that these significant rates of increase may reinforce other research suggesting changing climate conditions that allow ticks to live longer and in more regions may factor into disease risk.”
The Quest Diagnostics Health Trends™ report on Lyme disease is the latest in a series of reports from Quest providing insights derived from the company’s 44 billion de-identified laboratory test results, the largest database of clinical lab results in the word. These reports are intended to provide actionable insights that can improve health outcomes for conditions affecting a large number of Americans. Additional findings of the Quest Diagnostics Health Trends report on Lyme disease include:
Lyme disease remains most prevalent in the Northeastern United States Combined, Pennsylvania and the six New England states (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont) accounted for 60.6 percent of the total number of positive Lyme disease test results found in the United States in 2017.
Pennsylvania tops the nation in Lyme disease cases. With 10,001 cases in 2017, Pennsylvania saw the most positive Lyme disease test results of any state in the nation, and nearly as many found in all New England states combined (11,549).
Notable increases also observed in other states between 2015 and 2017includingGeorgia, Arizona, Ohio, Texas, Tennessee, and Virginia.
Spread by tick bites from infected blacklegged and deer ticks, Lyme disease is an infection by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi that causes more than 300,000 illnesses each year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It is the most commonly occurring vector-borne disease and the sixth most commonly reported notifiable infectious disease.
Common signs of potential Lyme exposure include the tell-tale “bullseye” shaped mark that frequently forms on the skin at a tick-bite location, or a presence of flu-like and/or other symptoms associated with Lyme or tick-borne infections.
Advaxis, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADXS), a late-stage biotechnology company focused on the discovery, development and commercialization of immunotherapy products, today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has allowed the Company’s IND application for its ADXS-HOT drug candidate for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Advaxis anticipates that because of this timely allowance, the first patient in the Phase 1/2 trial for this NSCLC drug candidate will be dosed by the end of 2018.
ADXS-HOT is a cancer-type specific immunotherapy approach that leverages the Company’s proprietary Lm technology platform to target hotspot mutations that commonly occur in specific cancer types as well as other proprietary tumor-associated antigens. To date, more than 10 drug candidates have been designed for different tumor types in the ADXS-HOT program.
“This is an exciting time for Advaxis as we prepare to initiate the first clinical trial with a drug candidate from our ADXS-HOT program. This drug candidate, ADXS-503, has been designed for the treatment of patients with NSCLC,” said Kenneth A. Berlin, President and Chief Executive Officer of Advaxis. “With our increased strategic focus on neoantigen-based therapeutics, including the personalized, patient-specific approach of our ADXS-NEO program, already in a clinical trial, we anticipate having five neoantigen-based drug candidates in clinical evaluation by the end of 2019. Our next two ADXS-HOT drug candidates will focus on prostate and bladder cancers. These two tumor types, along with NSCLC, were prioritized based on our evaluation of a number of factors relating to each, including the unmet medical need, time and investment required to demonstrate meaningful clinical activity and immunological sensitivity,” concluded Mr. Berlin.
The Company plans to initiate a Phase 1/2 clinical trial that will seek to establish the safety, tolerability and effectiveness of ADXS-503 administered alone and in combination with a checkpoint inhibitor in approximately 50 patients with metastatic NSCLC in different lines of therapy, at up to 20 centers across the U.S.
“I am pleased we can move forward to advance our first trial with ADXS-503, the first drug candidate in our ADXS-HOT program. This is an important clinical milestone as we seek to demonstrate proof-of-concept for ADXS-HOT immunotherapy in NSCLC, where there remains significant unmet need despite the introduction of checkpoint inhibitors and targeted therapies,” said Andres Gutierrez, M.D., Ph.D., Chief Medical Officer and Executive Vice President of Advaxis. “Earlier drug candidates from our Lm platform expressing a single antigen have shown a favorable safety profile and preliminary clinical activity in more than 500 subjects treated to date across different tumor types. This clinical experience with prior Lm drug candidates, combined with our ability to leverage the large capacity of our Lm vector to express multiple neoantigens and other tumor-associated antigens, provides the foundation for our belief that ADXS-HOT drug candidates such as ADXS-503 for NSCLC can provide a new standard for off-the-shelf neoantigen vaccines.”
Advaxis affirms plans to submit a total of four INDs for drug candidates from its ADXS-HOT program by the fourth quarter of 2019. Beyond NSCLC, prostate cancer and bladder cancer, the fourth ADXS-HOT drug candidate will be selected from breast, colorectal, ovarian or head and neck cancers.
About ADXS-HOT
ADXS-HOT is a program that leverages the Company’s proprietary Lm technology to target hotspot mutations that commonly occur in specific cancer types. ADXS-HOT drug candidates are designed to target acquired shared or “public” mutations in tumor driver genes along with other cancer-testes and oncofetal tumor-associated antigens that also commonly occur in specific cancer types. Although ADXS-HOT drug candidates have not yet been tested in patients, they are an off-the-shelf treatment approach been designed to potentially treat all patients with a specific cancer type, without the need for pretreatment biomarker testing, biopsy, DNA sequencing or diagnostic testing.
Even as a young adult, being overweight may cause higher blood pressure and thicken heart muscle, setting the stage for heart disease later in life, according to new research in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation.
The study is the first to explore if higher body mass index (BMI) — a weight-for-height index — results in adverse effects on the cardiovascular system in young adults.
While observational studies can suggest associations between risk factors or lifestyle behaviors and heart disease, they cannot prove cause-and-effect. Here, investigators triangulated findings from three different types of genetic analysis to uncover evidence that BMI causes specific differences in cardiovascular measurements.
“Our results support efforts to reduce body mass index to within a normal, healthy range from a young age to prevent later heart disease,” said Kaitlin H. Wade, B.Sc., Ph.D., lead author of the study and a research associate at the Medical Research Council Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol Medical School in the United Kingdom.
Researchers used data on several thousand healthy 17-year-olds and 21-year-olds who have participated in the ongoing Children of the 90s study (also known as the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children) since they were born in the Bristol area of the United Kingdom.
The researchers’ findings suggest that higher BMI:
caused higher systolic (top number) and diastolic (bottom number) blood pressure; and
caused enlargement of the left ventricle, the heart’s main pumping chamber.
“Thickening of vessel walls is widely considered to be the first sign of atherosclerosis, a disease in which fatty plaques build up within the arteries and lead to heart disease. However, our findings suggest that higher BMIs cause changes in the heart structure of the young that may precede changes in blood vessels,” Wade said.
Two of the analyses used in the study (Mendelian randomization and recall-by-genotype) take advantage of the properties of genetic variation. Recall-by-genotype is novel and exploits the random allocation of genes at conception.
“At a population level, this provides a natural experiment analogous to a randomized trial where we can compare differences in an outcome (such as heart structure and function) with differences in BMI, without the relationship being skewed by other lifestyle and behavioral factors,” Wade said.
Most participants in the longitudinal studies were white, limiting the generalizability of the findings to other ethnic groups.
The researchers plan to investigate the relationship between higher BMI and other possible disease mechanisms, such as the abundance and diversity of microbes living in the gut. They also hope to explore the relationship between BMI and cardiac structure and function in a population now in their 70s.
Kaitlin H. Wade et ao. Assessing the Causal Role of Body Mass Index on Cardiovascular Health in Young Adults Mendelian Randomization and Recall-by-Genotype Analyses. Circulation, 2018 DOI: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.117.033278
Novartis announced that the European Commission, EC, approved Aimovig for the prevention of migraine in adults experiencing four or more migraine days per month. Aimovig is the first and only treatment specifically designed for migraine prevention to be approved in the European Union, Switzerland, the US and Australia. It works by blocking a receptor called the calcitonin gene-related peptide receptor which plays a critical role in mediating the incapacitating pain of migraine. In the extensive clinical program of 2,600 patients, those on Aimovig experienced significant reductions in their number of migraine days per month, with a safety and tolerability profile similar to placebo. Aimovig can be self-administered or administered by another trained person every four weeks with the SureClick autoinjector pen, an established device commonly used for a range of different conditions. “Migraine matters. It is a painful, highly disruptive neurological disease that affects all aspects of life, from going to work to spending time with family and friends,” said Patrick Little, President of the European Migraine and Headache Alliance. “A treatment specifically designed for migraine prevention is a much-welcomed innovation and could transform lives of patients for whom current therapies do not work or are not well tolerated.” The EMA decision is applicable to all 28 European Union member states plus Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein. Aimovig received U.S. FDA approval for the preventive treatment of migraine in adults on May 17, 2018. Aimovig received Swissmedic approval in Switzerland on July 13, 2018 and Australian TGA registration on July 3, 2018. Additional regulatory filings are underway with other health authorities worldwide.
The company is announcing a restructuring program to align its operations with its evolving business needs. This is also due, in part, to the recent unexpected churn of a large customer. Under this program, the company intends to reduce operating expenses by 10%-15%. The actions associated with this program are expected to be largely completed by September 30. The company expects to take a restructuring charge in Q3, which will be excluded from its FY18 non-GAAP operating loss and non-GAAP net loss per share.
Piper Jaffray analyst Edward Tenthoff said he would remain a buyer of Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals shares ahead of a “busy” second half of the year. The company could have five RNAi candidates in the clinic this year, and partner Amgen (AMGN) nominated AMG-890 as a clinical candidate that could begin clinical trials this year. Tenthoff reiterated an Overweight rating and $17 price target on Arrowhead shares.
