VentureBeat

Why worms live longer – Scientists have known for some time that drastically reducing calorie intake appears to help animals from worms to rats live far longer than they ordinarily would. Now researchers have identified a gene that appears to play a major role in regulating that sort of life extension. Writing in Nature, a Salk Institute team describes how it identified a roundworm gene called pha-4 that seems to play a crucial role in diet-related lifespan increase. (Their technique was simple: After limiting their search to just 15 genes in the roundworm genome, the scientists methodically deactivated each one to see what effect it had on calorie-restricted lifespan, and found that worms lacking functioning pha-4 lived no longer no matter what their diet.)

The work, of course, is preliminary in almost every respect. Scientists don’t know exactly what role pha-4 may play in life extension, although they have some initial theories, and they don’t know what other genes might also be involved in the process. Humans also don’t have pha-4 genes, although we do possess three other similar genes, so it’s at least conceivable that it might one day be possible to take a drug that stimulates one of them to produce some sort of life-extension response. Someday, that is. Don’t hold your breath in the meantime.

Biotech IPOs continue to suck wind – Perlegen Sciences, an Affymetrix spinoff I mentioned a few days ago for their contribution to the international HapMap project, is the latest victim of investors’ lack of interest in biotech IPOs. Perlegen withdrew its IPO filing Monday (hat tip: VentureWire), citing now-familiar “market conditions.” The only twist here is that Perlegen also noted a reimbursement problem related to a government contract and said it was taking the opportunity to “enhance and strengthen” its financial controls related to contracting.

When — and where — scientists attack – Although scientists often like to refer to “the literature” as a sort of sacred repository of knowledge, the unfortunate and seldom-mentioned fact is that many research papers are full of errors. Many are inadvertent — often enough, the result of honest slipups, findings overtaken by later discoveries, or incorrect interpretations of data. Other problems may be the result of fraud or plagiarism. Or, as George Lundberg, a former editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, puts it:

Science grinds slowly. Truth is illusory. It is rare for any one study or article to establish long-lasting fact. That is just the way science is. But, apart from the normal back and forth-ing of studies and observations that eventually become established as reliable wisdom, all medical and science journals make messes.

Given space constraints in traditional journals, however, researchers’ ability to formally address, challenge and correct each other has generally been limited. So to that end, Lundberg and the journal he now edits, Medscape General Medicine (published by a unit of WebMD), are opening their pages as a “neutral place” for such disputes to be aired, regardless of where the original findings appeared. Lundberg again:

We now “welcome letters relating to unresolved publication issues in other medical journals, especially those involving the prior publication of conflicted results and interpretations not yet resolved by either retraction, correction or clarification.” We thus gingerly open this Pandora’s box of other journals’ turf, and await learning whether any envisioned pent-up effluence will be a trickle or turn into a flood. Watch with us and see. We believe that this will serve the public interest.

It will be fascinating to see if this catches on, but in the meantime it’s heartening to see Lundberg — who was fired from JAMA after running a brief report during the height of the Clinton impeachment hearings that asserted Americans have widely diverging views on what “having sex” actually means — still upsetting applecarts.

A bevy of start-ups are emerging to give people new ways to liberate them from the control of powerful health insurance companies — it’s about time.

Typically, you go to a doctor, and the doctor keeps your records on file and you can’t access them. But now people are demanding more freedom and transparency, and start-ups are responding.

The latest is Revolution Health, the start-up formed several years ago by AOL co-founder Steve Case, but which has been working quietly until its launch today. The company gave us access to the site a few weeks ago, and we’ve played with it. It is extensive, allowing you to build your records, find and compare local doctors, compare insurance companies (we’ve included a partial screenshot at bottom), help with claims and much more — it also wants to compete against the incumbent healthcare information and service portal, WebMD.

In fact, it is doing so much, that we agree with venture capitalist John Steuart, a specialist in healthcare who has looked closely at Revolution Health, when he says he can’t tell where the company plans to focus.

The most interesting Revolution Health appears to be offering — though it hasn’t made clear exactly how — is the ability to own and carry your own electronic health records (an idea Steuart finds worthy of venture backing, if it can be done right). That way, if you travel, or change providers, you can be treated wherever and by whoever you want. Also notable are Revolution Health’s service to find a cheap doctor, so that uninsured can avoid the emergency room. Moreover, it lets you compare insurance costs. This is useful, but it’s not clear how you build a business here (since there are several players in this area now).

Revolution is just the latest entrant, albeit one of the most talked about today, because of Case’s fame.

Other companies helping liberate parts of your personal health records (see good summary of the issue here) are CapMed and iHealthrecord.com. There’s another good summary of the industry in this Business 2.0 story.

Another is MedBillManager, a start-up in Nashville, TN that is run by three people, which gives you tools to track your bills, and a social networking feature that lets you compare insurance and other medical costs against that of other members. It is self-funded. Notably, managers of healthcare software players with competing products, Intuit ($49/year subscription) and SimoHealth (recently acquired by Revolution Health) have subscribed to MedBillManager’s testing version to see how it works, according to MedBillManager’s chief executive, Christopher Parks. Both Intuit and SimoHealth, however, are downloaded software programs instead accessible online, and don’t offer the social networking features. MedBillManager also wants you to be able to manage your records, but we didn’t see clearly how to do this in our test version.

Finally, there’s new start-up Taumed, of San Francisco, which is only related in that provides a way to search and ask for advice online, and find the latest healthcare news. However, it joins a host of competing search engines, in players like Dailystrength (see our story here), Kosmix and Healthline. Taumed tells VentureBeat it is raising a first round of capital.

Separately, the WSJ has a story today about Revolution Health (no link here, because the WSJ requires a subscription, but others covered the launch too), and the response by incumbent site, WebMD.

Revolution Health will offer telephone-consulting and digital-record services free for a year, to those who sign up within 90 days. The company says it eventually will charge $100 or so a year for a subscription to premium services. WebMD, in turn, released some tools today that look similar to those offered by Revolution Health — users will be able to store and maintain health records for free, and join forums about their health issues.