While there has been tremendous progress in biomedicine in recent decades, grand challenges remain in improving cancer prevention, diagnosis and therapy.  On June 29th, I participated the White House Cancer Moonshot Summit with Vice President Joe Biden, (along with several Exponential Medicine faculty). The Cancer Moonshot initiative is catalyzing progress not only with technology but also through helping align regulatory, academic and industry incentives, open data silos, increase patient involvement, access to clinical trials and more.  

In this week's Exponential Medicine Talks, the role of the empowered, engaged patient in their own cancer care is highlighted by MIT postdoc Steven Keating's talk  "Can Medical Selfies Save Us", and by UCSF surgeon and breast cancer specialist Laura Esserman describing her work in  "Reinventing clinical trials".

Apply now to join us this Oct 8-11 for Exponential Medicine. We will be beachside at the iconic Hotel Del Coronado with over 60 world class faculty (1st batch announced), 50 selected startups in the Innovation Lab (apply here to feature your startup or technology), over 30 breakout sessions, beachside bonding and much more. 
 

News Impacting the Future of Health & Medicine

Exponential Technologies
Robotic stingray powered by light-activated muscle cells (Science)
All you need to know about blockchain, explained simply (WEF)
Smart Dust Is Coming: New Camera Is the Size of a Grain of Salt (SingularityHub)

Future of Diagnostics & Therapy
Cancer Moonshot: Achieving Escape Velocity (Tincture)
This wheelchair lets paraplegics stand (Veterans Administration)
The Next Wearable Technology Could Be Your Skin (SingularityHub)
Cheap blood test can discriminate between bacterial, viral infections (StanfordMed)
FDA halts cancer immunotherapy trial after 3 patient deaths (CNN)
Engineers design programmable RNA vaccines (MIT)

Digital Health & Precision Medicine
NIH awards $120M to Scripps to enroll 350K participants in Precision Medicine Initiative (MobiHealth)
Apple is building organ donation into iOS 10 (TechCrunch) 
$3.9B in digital health funding for 2016's first half (MobiHealth)
Personal Technology and the Autistic Child: What One Family Has Learned (WSJ)
5 Trends Shaping Telemedicine in 2016 (HITConsultant)

NeuroTech
Architect with ALS designs a residence he can control with just blinks (STAT)
Microscopy technique allows scientists to pinpoint RNA molecules in the brain (MIT News)
Alzheimer's risk may be detectable from age 18 with genetic scoring (MNT)
How Psychedelic Drugs Could Help Treat Addiction (Motherboard)

Augmented & Virtual Reality
Cedars-Sinai unveils therapeudic virtual reality to enhance patient experience (HITConsultant)
Virtual reality lets you stroll around a breast cancer cell (New Scientist)
Seniors go virtual to relieve pain, loneliness (KQED