November 2022
Here I am on another night of rain-snow mix, sitting in a cold car waiting for a kid's music lesson, and realizing it's been a full turn of the seasons since the last newsletter.
My big news is that I've started a new medical device company with two friends!
I've been working in respiratory disease for most of my career. For much of that time, and from well before there was much interest or enthusiasm, I focused on digital health. Today the market is giant, but we allocate too much energy and capital to unimaginative, incremental projects and others that try to solve/exploit the weird problems of the US healthcare system. Not enough is going to create the new diagnostics, devices, and therapeutics we need to improve care and treatment.
Nothing public to share about the company yet, but I'm thoroughly enjoying being back at the beginning with a small team and a big vision, making a world together. More soon!
I've also started helping two other companies recently:
In August, I joined the board of Closed Loop Medicine as a non-exec director. CLM is a UK-based company developing digital tools for precision / personalized dosing of common medications. It's an overdue and promising departure from our monolithic approach of the past, as they outline in their latest whitepaper.
And in September, I began advising Aevice Health, a Singapore-based company building a wearable stethoscope to passively collect and analyze lung sounds from people at home and in the community. Excited to see how this helps shape and augment telehealth visits when they get to market.
Elsewhere - Some things I'm recommending these days:
A sizable percentage of people with asthma experience remission, but we've mostly ignored that puzzling outcome and never targeted it as a therapeutic goal. Thankfully, it's finally getting more attention now that we have disease-modifying treatments. Here's a good review in the latest ERJ
A new paper from KR Chapman and team, who always do the best work to expose the complex lived experience of asthma management and treatment, in this case, highlighting discrepancies and divergence between the new GINA guidelines and what patients prefer
And, if you can tolerate jazz flute, don't miss Steve Gadd's drumming on Hubert Law's album In the Beginning, and esp Airegin
What are you working on right now? Hit reply and send me something cool you wrote or built recently.
David