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The ideas and innovators shaping health care | | | | |  | | By Gregory Svirnovskiy, Carmen Paun, Ruth Reader, Erin Schumaker and Daniel Payne | Programming note: We’ll be off this Monday for Presidents Day but will be back in your inboxes on Tuesday.
| | |  Better heart health is the goal of a new European collaboration. | AFP via Getty Images | Governments across the pond are investing in artificial intelligence to help people with cardiovascular disease. The NextGen Project, a 21-member consortium of leading research institutions, universities and private companies, will look to harness AI to build out individualized treatment plans for patients struggling with heart conditions all over Europe. And thanks to the EU’s Horizon Europe program, it now has more than $8 million to work with. What they’re saying: “To develop individualized therapies, we need to compile as much information as possible about individuals, and that’s where NextGen comes in,” Dr. Pim van der Harst, the project coordinator, said in a press release. “The unique picture we generate will then form the basis for improving cardiovascular health and wellbeing.” Why it matters: Cardiovascular disease is a major killer in Europe, responsible for roughly 1 in 3 deaths in the EU. The statistics are similar in the U.S., where 695,000 Americans died from heart disease in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the condition’s economic impacts are in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Soon on the agenda: Develop guardrails to protect privacy while assembling troves of patient data.
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Mt. Sunapee, N.H. | Shawn Zeller/POLITICO | This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care. Lyme disease cases in the U.S. shot up nearly 70 percent after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its requirements for reporting new infections. Share any thoughts, news, tips and feedback with Carmen Paun at cpaun@politico.com, Daniel Payne at dpayne@politico.com, Ruth Reader at rreader@politico.com or Erin Schumaker at eschumaker@politico.com. Send tips securely through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp.
| | |  Tighter controls on synthetic DNA could stem biosecurity threats. | Idaho Press-Tribune via Idaho State Police via AP | A new international organization launched Thursday at a gathering of world leaders aims to improve biosecurity rules and develop tools to uphold them. The impetus: The risks posed by advances in biotechnology and AI. The International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science, introduced at the Munich Security Conference, will work to reduce the risk of accidental or deliberate misuse of bioscience and biotechnology, organizer Jaime Yassif told Carmen. The organization has raised more than $7 million, which should help it run for the next two to three years, from philanthropies including Effective Giving, Founders Pledge and Open Philanthropy, Yassif said. Why it matters: Biotechnology and AI advancements make it easier for scientists to create living organisms. But some could be risky pathogens that don’t exist in nature and could potentially trigger a pandemic. Game plan: The initiative has built software to allow providers of synthetic DNA to screen orders and customers to ensure they’re not selling the building blocks of dangerous pathogens to malicious actors. The software can examine whether an order is, for example, a gene that makes a pathogen more harmful or increases its ability to cause disease, said Piers Millett, the initiative’s executive director. “If we don’t know what hazards are in place, and something bad happens, we will see reactions that could limit the freedom of science,” he said. Putting in guardrails will help maintain and preserve scientific inquiry and “the ability to do all the incredible things with biotechnology that we want to see happen.”
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