The newborn was diagnosed with tracheobronchomalacia, a condition in which the airways collapse, not allowing oxygen to enter the lungs. That, tragically, caused repeated heart attacks. As the doctors said when writing up the case study for the New England Journal of Medicine, “ventilation that was sufficient to prevent recurring cardiopulmonary arrests could not be maintained.”

Doctors then printed a splint that is completely customized to the baby’s tracheal tubes, based on a “computed tomographic image of the patient’s airway.” It’s bioresorbable, made out of a material called polycaprolactone, so it will never need to be withdrawn, and the baby’s body will just naturally absorb and discard the splint within three years.

By that time, doctors say, the baby’s lungs and airways will have developed enough strength to stay open by themselves.

Source: New England Journal of Medicine

The 3-D printed tracheal insert being placed

According to LiveScience, prior to 3-D printing, lung splints were carved by hand. 3-D printed splints can be fabricated in a single day, however, and cost about a third as much.

After inserting the device, doctors kept the baby on a ventilator for 21 days, until the child was discharged from hospital. One year after the surgery, no “unforeseen problems related to the splint have arisen.”

Doctors’ conclusions?

“This case shows that high-resolution imaging, computer-aided design, and biomaterial three-dimensional printing together can facilitate the creation of implantable devices for conditions that are anatomically specific for a given patient.”

Asadi is the founder and CEO of Bina, a healthcare startup working to make ‘personalized medicine’ a reality. Bina applies big data analytics to genomics, making it possible to sequence the human genome in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks.

Today, Bina launched its commercial product. The platform provides physicians, clinicians, and researchers with a detailed picture of a patient’s health. From there, they can make data-driven diagnoses and prescribe individualized courses of treatment.

“Medicine today is very experimental,” said founder and CEO Narges Bani Asadi in an interview with VentureBeat. “Before, there was a bottle neck to crunch the massive amount of genomic data. At Bina, we have created the fastest, most highly accurate, cost-efficient processing solution available in the market today. The next step is to incorporate this genomic data into medical use. Data-driven, information-based medicine is much more targeted. Personalizing therapies for different diseases means a longer and healthier quality of life for all humans.”

There are thousands of genetic disorders. In 2013, over 580,000 Americans are expected to die of cancer. One in 20 babies born in the U.S. is admitted into the neonatal intensive care unit, and 20 percent of infant deaths result from congenital or chromosomal defects. Technology can be used to curb these terrifying trends. Bina’s role is to bridge the gap between DNA sequencing technology and the diagnosticians and clinicians who can apply it to their practice.

“The study of genomics has largely been a research activity done in medical schools and universities,” said Mark Sutherland, Bina’s senior vice president of business development. “They could only look at a few samples at a time because it was too expensive or complicated to do it at scale. There is a tidal wave of data that has not been manageable or in a format physicians can understand. Now we are seeing an inflection point. Sequencing is a powerful way of looking across a broad spectrum to provide insight into the cause of certain diseases and conduct risk assessments, early detection, or predict the possibility of recurrence. It can also be used to find applicable therapies and customize treatments.”

Asadi said her team had to achieve innovations in every step of genetic processing in order to create a scaleable, marketable, effective solution. Bina’s platform includes a hardware box to collect DNA, advanced software to process the data, and applications to turn the data into actionable form. Whereas before a full genetic analysis took weeks or months and could cost thousands of dollars, Bina turns it around within hours for around $200 a sample.

The technology emerged out of Asadi’s PhD work at Stanford. She collaborated with professors from around the world to apply high performance computing and computer architecture to gain a new understanding of human health and disease. Bina was founded in 2011 by three professors from the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford. It is backed by venture funding, and pilot customers include the Stanford Genetics Department and Palo Alto Veteran Affairs Hospital.

Startups don’t often set out to cure cancer or prevent infant mortality. However, as technology continues to evolve and along with it, the healthcare industry, a medical system where diagnoses and treatments are based on hard data, where each and every individual is treated  as such, could be on the horizon.

Read a VentureBeat guest post by Dr. Asadi: The personalized medicine revolution is almost here.

[To learn more about the most transformative IT trends hitting health care, including big data, consider coming to HealthBeat, our event for health care executives and decision-makers, on May 20-21 in San Francisco.]

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Robert Arauz didn’t intend to become an entrepreneur. He’s actually a scientist by profession and training. Starting a company is just the best way he’s found to solve some of the scientific and medical communities’ biggest problems.

His company, Innovation Choice, seeks to remove some of the blockades between information and the people who need it to solve big, global issues.

“We are solving a communications problem in the way scientists and researchers are able to share and obtain relevant medical information,” Arauz told VentureBeat in an email chat. Innovation Choice aims to be a professional network where scientists, educators, researchers, and students can quickly get accurate information from subject experts, all with a focus on respecting intellectual property and individual privacy.

“Today, these people have very limited options in terms of resources at their disposal that they can access in order to tackle the most important questions of our time.

“They aren’t looking for restaurant recommendations; they are seeking how to cure Alzheimer’s.”

Arauz knows the needs of these professionals well. As a research scientist himself, he said getting access to critical and specific information was usually “very expensive, ineffective, and very time consuming.” Innovation Choice, he said, is set up to be the exact opposite.

“We connect scientists from around the world so that they can collaborate and target technical questions in their field. … Using the medical journals to find information is only accessible to a select few and not very good at giving you exact answers; it just provides specific details about particular data. I want the discovery of the next penicillin to take months, not 10 years.”

Members of the site must be verified professionals in the field, which distinguishes the site from many of its competitors.

“I was a bit surprised by the emphasis on credentials,” said Andrew Rosenthal of Massive Health. “A lot of good stuff is bubbling up from people that don’t have formal credentials, and this company has made a very conscious decision to screen for them.”

Currently, Innovation Choice is in early, formative stages. Arauz expects to launch a beta version of the service in January 2013 and is currently trying to raise money for the startup.

Beyond basic startup goals such as product development, feature roll-out, and new user acquisition, Arauz says he’s also trying to “expand to work within the network of most universities (in their life sciences departments)” in his company’s next steps. He’s already partnered with UC Berkeley Extension and University of the Pacific.

“We are creating a product that can ultimately accelerate medical research,” Arauz concluded. “Our vision can yield discoveries that can positively affect millions of lives and make our world a better place to live.”

Innovation Choice is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Top image courtesy of Sergej Khakimullin, Shutterstock

“I watched two of my grandparents die ‘alone’ because they could no longer remember their family members who were sitting at their bedsides,” said Elli Kaplan.

In some ways, Kaplan is just one of the millions who’ve lost a family member or loved one to Alzheimer’s disease. But she’s also an entrepreneur who’s aiming her life’s work at Alzheimer’s and related dementia. Neurotrack, her new company, provides a simple-for-consumers but highly sophisticated diagnostic test that tracks eye movement to diagnose Alzheimer’s three to four years before any symptoms occur.

“I want to do something so that my parents and my children do not go through this,” Kaplan told VentureBeat in a recent email conversation.

“Alzheimer’s disease continues to elude scientists, researchers, and physicians in terms of what causes the disease, how to detect and diagnose it, and how to treat it,” she said. “Because the biggest problem with developing an effective preventive or disease-modifying drug is populating the clinical trials with qualified candidates, Neurotrack’s technology has the potential … to have an enormous impact.”

Here’s how it works: You sit in front of a computer screen with an eye-tracking device and view a series of images, some novel and some not novel. Based on how much time you spend looking at the novel image versus the image that hasn’t changed, Neurotrack can give you a prognosis.

“It is a seemingly simple test that brings together two very complex things,” said Kaplan. “First, a human being’s innate preference for novelty; and second, the discovery, made by Dr. Stuart Zola, that by tracking the way an individual moves their eyes, particularly when viewing objects or images, one is able to diagnose impairments that exist in the brain that might not be diagnosable by even more invasive diagnostic tools.”

Neurotrack’s second product removes the need for the eye-tracker, making the test even more accessible and affordable for families and indviduals around the globe. The redesigned test uses a mouse or track pad. “The test works similarly to the [eye-tracker] test, but the images are blurred,” said Kaplan. “A user can bring the images into focus using a viewport that is controlled by the mouse. The mouse movement is exactly correlated with eye movement and renders the same results.”

So what’s so great about an early diagnosis of a currently incurable disease? you might wonder.

“One of the biggest problems that pharmaceutical companies face today in terms of developing preventive drugs for Alzheimer’s disease is populating the clinical trials with the right type of people — those who are pre-symptomatic but who we know will convert to Alzheimer’s disease in the future,” Kaplan told us. “According to Eli Lily and Merck, 80% of the people in Alzheimer’s clinical trials for preventive or disease modifying drugs fail out of the trials at some point because they no longer meet the trial criteria.”

So by making sure clinical trials have the right subjects, testing for new Alzheimer’s drugs and treatments can be made a lot better. Trials can be conducted more quickly, and life-saving drugs could get to market much faster.

Plus, for families, an extra few years to plan financially for Alzheimer’s can be a huge benefit.

“The costs of Alzheimers disease are enormous,” said Kaplan, “$200 billion today and projected to be in excess of $1 trillion by 2050.”

To date, Neurotrack has received $50,000 in state grants from the Georgia Research Alliance. Emory University received approximately $2.3 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Woodruff Foundation to support the scientific research behind Neurotrack’s diagnostic tests.
“I wouldn’t raise any more money for this kind of thing, I would partner with a pharma,” suggested Jason Krikorian partner at DCM at the DEMO Conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

The Atlanta-based startup, which launched over the summer, is currently raising a seed round of $1.5 million to $2.5 million from strategic and institutional investors.

Neurotrack is one of more than 75 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Top image courtesy of Kuttelvaserova, Shutterstock

Medical and technological advancements of the recent decade have finally paved the way to cure one of the most malevolent diseases: the common cold.

Scientists in Australia are using IBM supercomputing technology to simulate the 3D motion of the human rhinovirus and accelerate the development of new antiviral drugs.

Supercomputers such as IBM’s Blue Gene/Q enable such research. Before this, scientists couldn’t run simulations to form a complete picture of the virus; they could only form parts of it. The necessary processing power to include over 3 million atoms of the atom’s shell and the RNA genome was not available until they got the Blue Gene/Q.

“This will allow researchers to gain a more precise picture of how a drug attacks rhinovirus at the molecular level, and potentially lead to future treatments for other viruses,” Dr. John Wagner, the manager of the IBM Research Collaboratory for Life Sciences in Melbourne, Australia, wrote in a blog post today.

The simulation uses information from a new antiviral drug developed by Australian company Biota Holdings LTD, which is routinely given to people with medical conditions whose lives could be threatened if they are exposed to the common cold.

Researchers hope to learn how the virus interacts with drugs on a molecular level and use this information to combat other diseases in the same family. The supercomputer is also being used to fight a wide range of human diseases, such as epilepsy, cancer, polio and malaria.

Image courtesy of IBM Research 

Rather, it’s doctors.

More specifically, medical mistakes and errors resulting from miscommunication. That’s exactly what professional networking tool for doctors Doximity was founded to fix.

A social network with a low profile everywhere but the medical community, Doximity has now signed up 11 percent of all U.S. physicians. The network focuses on helping doctors communicate and work together in a secure environment to coordinate patient care better and faster.

“Doximity is the largest and only real-name identified and verified private physician communications platform,” founder and chief executive Jeff Tangney told VentureBeat. “Unlike traditional social media, Doximity enables doctors to securely discuss patient care in a private, closed, HIPAA-secure environment.”

That’s important, because the medical community is significantly siloed, making it difficult for specialists, doctors, and other health care professionals to coordinate client care. Digital technologies haven’t made enormous strides yet in medicine – as of 2009 only nine percent of hospitals had an electronic records system in place — and tools for secure, simple doctor-to-doctor communication aren’t yet ubiquitous.

Doximity is looking to change that.

Other companies such as Sermo, QuantiaMD, and DocBookMD are doing similar things, but Doximity views its primary competitor as old technology and old practice:

“Our real competitors are the pager and the fax machine and any other antiquated form of communication still used in medicine today,” according to Tangney.

Perhaps not surprisingly given those tools, miscommunication between care providers is the root cause of 65 percent of serious medical errors, according to the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.

“Medicine is a team sport,” Tangney said in a statement. “Communication is just so vital.”

Source: Doximity

CEO Jeff Tangney

Doximity allows doctors to connect online as well as on the go with mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, or Android smartphones.

The company is backed by $10.8 million in venture capital from Emergence Capital Partners and InterWest Partners. Its chief executive, Jeff Tangney, previously founded Epocrates, a mobile medical data company. Doximity is based in San Mateo, California.

Image credit: ShutterStock

These days, particularly in the wake of Facebook’s $5 billion S-1 filing, few will argue the explosive impact that social media is having on the way we live.

We see it in the way relationships build, the way messages spread, and the tremendous amount of data that’s been assembled about who we are and what we do.

The potential is huge; but until very recently, physicians have been largely unable to take full advantage of what these connections have to offer. Specifically, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 prevents doctors from using email or text messaging, much less open platforms like Facebook or Twitter, to communicate about patient care without risk of being fined or fired.

Still, the potential for physician-focused, web-based networks is huge, and HIPAA-compliant tools and sites have indeed started to take shape and populate.

Healthcare itself has been (often rightly) criticized as slow to change. In fact, Dr. Leslie Saxon recently published an insightful article on why the Internet hasn’t yet had any real impact on how medicine is practiced.

But research has shown that as far as technology goes, doctors themselves have proven to be early adopters. Having seen the kinds of conversations that have already begun to take place, I strongly believe that the future of digital medicine will be anchored in these kinds of connections.

Think, for example, of the impact of having a rural doctor in Alaska be able to send pictures of a complicated emergency case to a former classmate now working at a stroke center in Boston — and getting real-time feedback. This is where, in my mind, social networking truly goes from entertaining to life-changing.

With physicians connecting in real time across specialties and beyond the traditional bounds of hospital walls, patients may soon be able to stop worrying about getting access to the right specialist.

Medicine’s brightest minds will be accessible from the remotest spots — on an airplane, at an underserved clinic, or in the thick of a disaster zone. Soon, any doctor with a mobile device will have the resources and reach to pull together a personalized, patient-specific team of experts for any given case. Sometimes, it will take as little as a question to the right expert in a sub-specialty to change the course of treatment for the better. In other instances, more lasting and meaningful collaborations might take shape.

Information itself is poised to travel differently, too. Facebook and Twitter are already showing us how effectively networked communities can transmit important data, and even bring obscure new ideas to the forefront of cultural debate.

For doctors, who have historically relied heavily on sifting through a surfeit of medical journals, this kind of hive-minding can help ensure that the most promising and thought-provoking research or techniques rise to the surface and reach a wider audience. Moreover, by posting, sharing, and commenting on articles and cases within their professional networks, physicians will become more active and engaged participants in the future of medical research and learning.

The existence of these large and overlapping communities of doctors promises to tap a goldmine of public health data. Using discussion threads about symptoms and outbreaks, the spread of infectious disease can be tracked automatically, as can the efficacy and speed of treatment plans. Complications of new therapies, previously unknown risk factors for common diseases, even entirely new disease entities may be identified from increased sharing of data that has until now lived in the filing cabinets and memories of individual physicians.

The social power of networks like Facebook and Twitter to connect, entertain, and enrich our lives is undeniable. It’s time to extend the networking paradigm to healthcare and reap an even more substantive set of rewards.

Alex Blau, MD, Medical Director at Doximity, is a graduate of the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine and trained in emergency medicine at Stanford Hospital and Clinics. He has been working in the emerging mobile health space since he was a senior medical student, when he founded MediBabble, an iPhone-based medical language interpretation tool now in use by more than 15,000 health care professionals. In addition, Dr. Blau has worked as a healthcare journalist, has been published in multiple journals and textbooks on emergency medicine, and has been an invited speaker at national conferences on early stage startups and innovation in healthcare.

Image courtesy of lightpoet, Shutterstock

Every single person in the world has a health story. As a doctor, my job is to help people edit the story that your health is telling and to treat your story as unique to make you healthier. It’s our signature challenge to become more efficient and accurate editors as digital healthcare begins to scale worldwide, which can create 8 billion health stories.

My own story as an MD — and my interest in Big (Health) Data — started when I was an intern in my hometown at St. Louis City Hospital in 1985. I thought I could make a contribution treating people in the inner city.

I spent many on call nights in the ER. The ER itself was like a war zone: violent, dirty, full of law enforcement officials, and in the middle of this chaos, families bringing in their sick kids for elective things. There wasn’t and still isn’t an evening option for working parents, and the system fails the indigent poor most dramatically.

After three years in the inner city hospital system, I realized that neither patients nor providers had the tools to deliver effective care and that the solutions to health problems there were largely political and out of my control.

I left St. Louis and moved on to training as a cardiologist and then as an interventional electrophysiologist. Seven years later, I became a high-tech specialist working at a major university in San Francisco, implanting sophisticated devices that treat and actually prevent sudden cardiac death.

It was lucky timing: 1995 was the beginning of an incredible 10-year high-tech wave in heart disease innovation. When I was in San Francisco during the 1990s dotcom boom, I watched as Silicon Valley introduced us to the Information Age. It has changed my world, but it hasn’t much changed how I practice medicine. Back then, we doctors and dotcomers were sitting in the same restaurants, but we weren’t drinking the same Kool-Aid.

It took a decade but the digital revolution finally started coming to medicine. I found myself sitting in meetings on Sand Hill Road with venture capitalists and technologists talking about the big opportunity in health: scaleable health care that could help hundreds of millions of people. But technology companies were too afraid to assail — or too timid to tame — the beast of healthcare.

Mostly, they still are. Today, we have thousands of health and fitness apps connecting us to digital “coaches” and helping us socialize with our friends, but we don’t have a medical platform. We don’t have a medical Google, or an Amazon, or a Facebook. We don’t even have an AOL of medicine. What we mostly have is a Wikipedia for medicine, which I and my fellow clinicians and colleagues quote daily. (That’s a good thing.)

We have had some big successes with digital medicine. In my field about six years ago, device companies started putting antennas into implanted devices. We now analyze data from those devices in more than 200,000 patients. We’ve collected information on 20 million device downloads, recorded 150,000 life-saving interventions, and collected millions of pieces of valuable additional data. The numbers were clear. Here is what we’ve learned:

If you open up this implanted device to the network, people live longer.

We live longer and healthier lives when our health is continuously monitored by a device and exceptions to normal health are reported by the device to our caregivers. The technology exists and is often very inexpensive. It keeps people out of hospitals; saving money and lives. We’ve proven that.

So why aren’t we doing more monitoring? It’s not a regulatory problem or a lack-of-vision problem in the medical and technology companies; it’s that there’s too much perceived risk in changing the medical structure.

These technologies could profoundly improve the basics of how we practice medicine. Being connected fundamentally changes the doctor-patient relationship.

We get continuous data, review exceptional events daily, and can alert patients when they need help. We can catch disease patterns as they are happening. We have the potential to act within minutes or hours versus months in the traditional follow-up clinic. Patients can learn to partner in their care. They can be meaningfully engaged and empowered. We live in the so-called Information Age. A time when you can look up anything: bank records, flight information, and the price of tea in china. Just about anything.

But how many of us have a copy and control of our own health records or that of our family members? How many of us interact with our own health data as fluently and seamlessly as we do with our finances or sports scores?

A common view in the medical community is that people don’t know how to handle their own health information. That it takes a professional to interpret it. How would we feel if we were told we couldn’t handle our own banking information or our kids’ report cards? Meaningful access to our personal health information is a right, and encouraging that access will become one of the most important civil rights issues of our era.

Over the next two years mobile phones and inexpensive sensors will better connect us, if we choose this path. We will see individualized care on a scale that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

Imagine your doctor calling you to schedule an appointment because she knows the condition of your body, rather than vice versa. We see products at the University of Southern California Center for Body Computing before they hit the market: sensors are becoming more powerful and much smaller.

At the USC Center for Body Computing, we conducted a study using the AliveCor ECG case. (We presented the results a couple weeks ago at the American College of Cardiology.) We gave it to 50 people with iPhones who attend our yearly Body Computing Conference. We found people transmitted an average of 36 30-second tracings a week.

I personally reviewed all the tracings. In one situation, I was able to diagnose acute cardiac ischemia in a Nigerian gentleman in Mumbai from my home in Los Angeles by reviewing a 30-second ECG collected on the iPhone. Helping this person was personally gratifying and represents a brilliant example of leveraging our experts across the globe.

We have a global wireless network that is ruthlessly efficient, more mobile phones than people, and global carriers that can deliver medical data continuously. We have tablets with medical grade image and video quality capability. We have diverse digital storage capabilities. We have vast social networks. The most successful companies in the world right now make or enable most of these products. That means there is a lot of interest. That means there is a lot of investment.

Sensors are becoming ubiquitous and advanced. They are in phones, in shoes, in your teeth, in small patches. At the CBC we’re testing them in cars, in athletes, and in kids games.

This is an important advance for several reasons. One night a few months ago, I was playing tennis with a 19 year-old who plays for a local junior college. On our last point, at the end of the 90-minute game, I was at the net and she missed a ball. She stumbled to the back fence and collapsed against it.

I ran over and felt her pulse and it was going extremely fast. I used the AliveCor case to diagnosis her arrhythmia and was able to terminate it with a physical maneuver before she passed out. Turns out that she’d already played several hours of tennis that day, hadn’t really eaten or hydrated and hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before.

I had been thinking about, doing research on, and implanting devices in patients (including athletes) at risk for sudden cardiac death for 20 years, and yet I never considered that some of those sudden deaths occur because of the type of rhythm I witnessed first hand in the tennis player that night. What is generally considered a more pedestrian nonfatal rhythm in others can be deadly in an elite athlete.

This is the kind of on-demand medical information I was looking for my entire professional life.

By simply collecting basic vital signs we can help a kid in Ecuador with a heart arrhythmia, and a kid in Washington DC with diabetes. We can create ways to eventually help billions of people. The 21st Century version of the house call will be as far away as a smartphone.

So how do we start to deliver on the outrageously great and transformational potential that personalized digital medicine holds? We think it starts with that first point of contact. We need to get everyone connected—at least once—to the digital health ecosystem

To encourage wide adoption, we are building a platform to bridge the digital divide and connect the more than 5 billion mobile phones in the world to the health ecosystem. We want to use every day mobile phones to collect one piece of the world’s health data stream to increase the health information flow and to create “Big Data” life analytics. Our initiative is called http://www.everyheartbeat.org. By 2013 we hope to create a system in which anyone can log-in and start recording their health narrative through their wireless phone. We estimate that recording 6 billion people’s heart rates will consume 1 terabyte of information a day; that is 1000 less than the movie Avatar. (As part of an ongoing study we have already recorded heart rates from 20 million device downloads.)

I think about the world in a few years and imagine owning and sharing health data just like we can share our life on social networks.

What will billions of heart beats show us?

It’s like the Human Genome Project.

We can use Big Health Data to study life patterns, identify disease, solve endemic health problems, and give us more control over our health.

It’s the beginning of an evolution toward knowing oneself and accepting the commonality of health needs and awareness across humanity. We are trying to tell the story of eight billon heart beats because we know it will help that sick kid in the ER at 3 a.m. in Mumbai, in Bangladesh, in Sao Paulo, in the Bronx, in East Los Angeles, in St. Louis. Everyone in the world can participate, and push medicine toward a health information revolution. This is the Internet of You. That helps 8 billion people. That helps all of us. One heartbeat at a time.

Leslie A. Saxon, MD, is the Founder and Executive Director of the University of Southern California Center for Body Computing, and the Chief of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. This essay was adapted from Dr. Saxon’s 2012 TEDMED talk.

Image courtesy of Monika Wisniewska, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Although Apple is fond of showing iPad users playing games, watching movies, and listening to music on its ubiquitous tablet, more and more industry professionals are finding ways to incorporate the iPad into genuinely productive enterprise-level work. No longer just for Angry Birds, iPads can now be found in schools and universities, doctor’s offices, stockrooms, and boardrooms. There is an ever-expanding menu of specialized enterprise apps that are making the iPad a must-have office supply.

PlanGrid: Blueprints on the iPad

A prime example is the PlanGrid app, which allows users to store, view, and manage blueprints on the iPad. PlanGrid also allows note taking and sharing from the field, and uses the cloud to store project drawings and receive updates. All of the features of the app were designed specifically to save contractors time and money by making it easy to access blueprints and to share notes and changes. The availability of blueprints in a digital format not only saves time — no more waiting for the blueprints to be physically printed, no mistakes made by building off of old blueprints — but also takes a significant amount off the bottom line; PlanGrid claims that for every million dollars in building costs, there are typically printing costs of $3,500. The app is free to download in the App Store and for the first 50 sheets. Larger plans cost $20 or $50 a month.

Mobile MIM: X-rays in your doctor’s pocket

The new iPad touts the quality of its new retina display, and what better way to put it to the test than to use it for extremely vital visual information — like an X-ray or an MRI? MIM Software has done just that with its Mobile MIM app, which is used by medical professionals to view images from CT, MRI, X-ray, ultrasounds, PET, and SPECT scans. The app can also review images, contours, DVH, and isodose curves from radiation treatment plans. Doctors, nurses, lab techs, and other medical professionals can download data using an encrypted transfer to protect patient privacy, and set a passcode to encrypt non-image information and prevent unauthorized access.  Patients can also access their information from the cloud, making it easy to communicate across long distances. The Mobile MIM app is free to download from the App Store, but the companion cloud service does charge.

Kitchen IQ: Food safety and more for restaurants

While the iPad is used by culinary aficionados and amateur chefs to find and store recipes, take photos of food, organize and plan meals, and keep track of grocery lists, it’s also increasingly being used in the restaurant industry by managers to train staff, acquire customer feedback, plan and record events, keep track of expenses, and manage reservations. One example is the free Kitchen IQ app, designed to help restaurant professionals maintain operations according to health standards and guidelines by providing tips on avoiding foodborne illnesses. It also explains labeling options, finds common pitfalls, and even has a virtual Food Safety Audit for kitchen inspections.

EasyBib: Assistant for academics

Many see the iPad as a threat to traditionally paper products like newspapers, magazines, books, and libraries — however, many of these industries are adapting the tablet to their own purposes. Case in point is the free EasyBib app, which scans a book by bar code (or by entering in the title) to provide you with MLA, APA and Chicago style citations, or you can write your own citations. Citations can then be emailed or exported to EasyBib’s bibliography management service for easy organization.

Stock Room: Track inventory

Similarly, stockroom managers will be assisted by the simply named Stock Room app, which tracks inventory of items in a stock room or storage area. Users can snap photos of the items they need to track, perform a receipt of items into a stock room, keep a detailed log of receipts and items leaving the stock room as well as email a list of received items, of items being used, of item history and of current stock of the item. The personalization and detailed entries can help managers keep track of office supplies, spare equipment, mail supplies, tools or vehicle inventory. Stock Room costs $1.99.

The company tags pharmaceutical products in emerging markets with a scratch-off code which is verified by sending a text message to Sproxil’s product authentication service. Sproxil was one of two companies to receive an honourable mention from the judges in the recent IBM smartcamp global finals (having previously won the Boston competition) and was one of the most talked-about startups in the competition.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that less than 1 percent of drugs in industrialized nations are counterfeit but that rate could be as high as 50 percent in some developing countries like Nigeria and Congo. WHO calculates that 200,000 of deaths caused by malaria alone could be prevented if all antimalarials were genuine. The U.S.-based Center for Medicines in the Public Interest (CMPI) projects that in 2010, counterfeit drugs will be a US $75 billion business, an increase of more than 92 percent from 2005.

Drug companies have developed myriad methods to verify the authenticity of their products including RFIDs, barcodes and holograms on packaging, chemical tests and laser scanning. Unfortunately, most of these methods have either been compromised or are too expensive for use in emerging markets. Sproxil uses simple scratch-off codes, of the type used to top up pre-paid cell phones, attached to either the drug blister, packet or an entire pallet depending on who needs to validate the product’s authenticity. The code is single use and is sent by text message to Sproxil’s authentication service. In Nigeria, more than 1,400,000 pharmaceutical items have been labeled with Sproxil’s technology.

I talked to Sproxil’s CEO Ashifi Gogo about the market and business model. According to Gogo, Sproxil can provide the mobile authentication technology more cheaply than the pharma companies themselves, because it can aggregate multiple pharma clients. When asked about the other authentication methods most likely to compete with Sproxil’s technology, Gogo mentioned barcodes but pointed out that many phones in developing countries are not yet capable of photographing the barcode and sending it for authentication.

Currently, clients pay a few cents for each code and for the text messages. Since Sproxil currently gets a fee even if the user does not text the code, it generates revenue from unused texts. Gogo intends to switch from this flat fee model to a per transaction fee as the business grows. Sproxil also sends targeted ads to users who have authenticated a code. These ads have increased sales by 10 percent for one client in Nigeria in only 3 months.

Gogo foresees the authentication technology being used for other items such as wines and spirits (fake versions are a major problem in Asia, apparently) and luxury goods. Initially though, Sproxil plans to expand into Kenya and eventually India which has a huge counterfeit drug problem. Sproxil is not the only company out there using cell phones for verification. MPedigree operates a similar scheme in Kenya.

Sproxil was founded in 2009, has 12 staff members and offices in Somerville, MA and Lagos, Nigeria. The company is privately funded and, according to Gogo, profitable.