IBM is putting the finishing touches on a computer program that will compete against human contestants on “Jeopardy!” 

Comparing such an achievement to Deep Blue, the venerable tech company’s chess-playing program that beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 is like comparing checkers to chess.

Chess is a game of simple statistical probabilities, a lot of them it’s true, and pieces with clearly defined powers.

“Jeopardy!” presents more daunting challenges for computers, which must weigh nuances of language including double entendres, puns, and analogies faster than Ken Jennings on crack.

The machine has been dubbed Watson in honor of IBM founder Thomas Watson. It is the culmination of a 3-year project involving a team of 20 with expertise in language processing, information retrieval and machine learning.

“The big goal is to get computers to…converse in human terms,” said David Ferucci, an AI scientist and the team’s leader.

In the contest, Watson will receive questions as electronic text, whereas the human contestants will, as usual, see the question and hear it spoken by host Alex Trebek.

Watson will use a synthesized voice to respond and select follow-up categories.

It will not be connected to the Internet during the contest, instead rendering answers from text that had been processed and indexed in advance.

Harry Friedman, the show’s executive producer, indicated he might invite Jennings to carry the flag for humans.

In 2004 Jennings won 74 consecutive contests and collected $2.5 million along the way.

In prepping for the contest, Watson will have stored a large chunk of the Web as indexed by Google, but it’ll mean nothing if the machine can’t understand the context of each clue.

For example, the sentence “I never said she stole my money” can have seven meanings depending on which word is stressed.

“We love those sentences,” Eric Nyberg said. “Those are the ones we talk about when we’re sitting around having beers after work.” The computer scientist from Carnegie Mellon University is on the development team.

That didn’t take long.

Just 3 days after the Big O appeared to make serious hay out of last Monday’s announcement that key health care stakeholders were steppin’ up to save 2 trillion or so in future health care costs, reps from providers and insurers threw a bushel of thumb tacks on the road.

The Coronated One had hailed their cost-cutting promise as historic.

“These groups are voluntarily coming together to make an unprecedented commitment,” Obama told the New York Times. “Over the next 10 years, they are pledging to cut the rate of growth of national health care spending by 1.5% each year, an amount that’s equal to over $2 trillion.”

Not so, say the reps, who clearly caught an earful from their constituencies after the photo op. They claim to have agreed to cool off spending more gradually and never did they sign up for specific year-by-year cuts.

“There’s been a lot of misunderstanding that has caused a lot of consternation among our members,” Richard Umbdenstock told the Times. And the president of the American Hospital Association added that he’s “spent the better part of three days trying to deal with it.”

To make matters worse, Nancy-Ann DeParle, the director of the White House Office of Health Reform, then pulled a John Kerry by saying “the president misspoke,” and then saying “I don’t think the president misspoke. His remarks correctly and accurately described the industry’s commitment.”

Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans remembers reaching consensus around the concept that savings would “ramp up” more gradually than what Obama had said.

And for his part, David Nexon, an EVP of the Advanced Medical Technology Association recalled that “there was no specific understanding” of the pace with which savings would be achieved.

A national study has revealed that 8.5% of US kids aged 8 to 18 are addicted to video games, with many lying about how much they play, skimping on homework and struggling to cut back.

Iowa State University’s Douglas Gentile published the findings in Psychological Science.

“For some kids, they play in such a way that it becomes out of balance. They’re damaging other areas of their lives,” Gentile told the Washington Post.

Gentile adapted criteria for the diagnosis of pathological gambling into a set of questions about video gaming. The questions were then added to a 2007 Harris Poll involving 1,178 children and teens.

He classified players as “pathological” if they reported having 6 or more of 11 symptoms on his list.

Symptoms included irritability or restlessness when gaming was reduced, devoting increasing amounts of time and money to video games in order to get the same degree of excitement, skipping homework or chores to play games, lying about playing time, and stealing money to pay for new games.

Pathological gamers did worse in school, had more trouble paying attention in class and were more likely to report attention-deficit disorder, according to Gentile. These findings held up after controlling for gender and age.

“It’s not that the games are addictive,” Gentile told the Post. “It’s that some kids use them in a way that is out of balance and harms various other areas of their lives.”

Mark Griffiths, the director of the International Gaming Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University doubted the scale of video game addiction reported by Gentile. “If there really were 8.5% of children who were genuinely addicted, there would be treatment clinics all over America,” he said.

The makers of Avastin have announced that their favorite blockbuster appears to be ineffective as adjuvant chemotherapy for patients with colon cancer.

The drug cops $2.7 billion in US revenues alone for G-Tech. It is FDA approved  for late-stage cancers of the breast, colon and lung.

In such settings, Avastin prolongs life by a few months.

The new trial was designed to see how useful the cancer fighter might be in preventing recurrent disease if given immediately following surgery to remove the tumor; in other words, early on in the course of the disease.

A positive study would probably have quadrupled revenues for G-Tech, which was recently acquired by Roche after a lengthy, tumultuous negotiation. 

The 2 companies vowed to press their efforts to find another way for Avastin to crack the larger market.

“Our initial review of the data leads us to…believe Avastin may be active in patients with early-stage colon cancer,” G-Tech’s CMO Hal Barron insisted to the New York Times.

The companies did not actually release findings from their trial, other than to say it was negative. They’ll be mining the heck out of the data, that means, until their full presentation which will be delivered at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meetings later this month. 

During the abovementioned negotiations, G-Tech set the odds for Avastin’s success in this trial to be 61%.

Roche had pegged it at 55%.

Roche clearly wanted to close the acquisition before results of the trial were announced, assuming that its success would bump G-Tech’s stock price through the roof and queer the deal.

It looks now like had the Swiss giant waited, it could have paid a lot less.

The number of Americans that have registered as organ and tissue donors is rising, but the registry still contains only 38% of licensed drivers, according to a survey conducted on behalf of Donate Life America.

Meanwhile, “the number of people awaiting organ transplants has climbed to more than 100,000, and an average of 18 people die each day waiting for organs,” said Donate Life America Chair Sara Pace Jones.

The online survey of 5,100 U.S. adults revealed several misperceptions about organ donation and the registration process.

For example, only 50% of respondents correctly believe physicians will try as hard to save their lives if the caregivers were to become aware of their wish to be an organ donor.

In addition, 44% mistakenly believe there is a black market in the US where people can buy or sell organs or tissue, and only 43% understand it is not possible for a brain dead person to recover from his or her injuries.

“Those who support donation (need) to legally document those wishes, and registering through the DMV or state donor registries is the (best way) to do that. Anyone can find out how to register in their state by visiting www.donatelife.net ”

“There is a real crisis taking place with regards to organ availability in this country – and dispelling commonly held misperceptions and increasing the public’s trust of the donation and transplant system is paramount when it comes to solving it,” said Pace Jones.

The online survey of adults in all 50 states was carried out by Survey Sampling International. The sample was designed to be representative of the US population as a whole.

Continuing an apocalyptic trend, venture capital investment in Q1, 2009 has dropped 50% from the same quarter a year earlier. 

Young companies raised a paltry $3.9 billion in the first quarter of 2009, as compared with $7.78 billion in Q1 2008, according to VentureSource.

That represented the lowest quarterly investment in 11 years.

Remarkably, it was $2 billion less than the quarterly investment total in Q4, 2008 when the Great Economic Crisis matured into a fire-breathing dragon. 

VentureSource reported that only 477 venture-backed companies closed equity financings in Q1 2009. The number was 706 one year earlier, and 601 in Q4 2008.

Angel and first-round financing fell even more sharply, to $682 million in Q1. That’s just one-third of the spend a year earlier.

Much of the problem is traceable to the enormous drops in the portfolio values of pension funds, foundations and endowments that typically finance VC firms.

These limited partners had started becoming gun-shy regarding VCs even before the Great Economic Crisis due to underperformance for nearly a decade.

“LPs are using this to demand a back-to-basics approach,” said Maria Cirino, a co-founder and managing director of .406 Ventures, an early-stage venture firm in Boston. This means smaller funds and investment strategies with a tighter focus, she said.

IT, a staple for VCs, recorded its worst quarter in 12 years with $1.68 billion invested. That’s off 52% from Q1 2008.

Health care did a bit better, netting investments worth $1.35 billion in Q1 2009, down “only” 34% from a year earlier. The sector saw 118 deals close in the quarter, much lower than the 156 that got done in Q4 2008.

Scientists at the Medical College of Georgia have figured out why a high-fiber diet helps prevent and possibly treat colon cancer.

Apparently, the stuff activates a cellular receptor that triggers a biochemical cascade which leads to apoptosis, or cell death in malignant cells.

In a fiber-poor environment, colon cancer cells deactivate the receptor, which is called GPR109A, by methylating the gene responsible for its production.

DNA methylation inhibitors are being studied as treatments for several cancers right now.

“We know the receptor is silenced in cancer but it’s not like the gene goes away,” Vadivel Ganapathy explained to BurrillReport.  He’s the senior author on the paper, which appears in Cancer Research.

The beneficial events begin when gut bacteria metabolize fiber using a process that releases butyrate. This chemical binds to the receptor and the next thing you know, cancer cells vaporize. 

But that’s not all. Activation of this receptor may also reduce inflammation which can promote cancer formation.

And wait, there’s more. Butyrate seems able to inhibit an enzyme that promotes uncontrolled growth of malignant cells.

Straight butyrate might work even better than fiber, but the stuff has an ungodly taste. And since fiber tastes like, well, fiber, the MCG scientists wonder whether a related compound like niacin, also known as Vitamin B3 or nicotinic acid, could have similar benefits.

Many people take niacin to control hypercholesterolemia.

That’s a lot of biochemistry but in a nutshell, “colon cancer does not want to have anything to do with butyrate,” summarized Ganapathy.

In 2006, Massachusetts enacted a law that vastly reduced the number of uninsured Bay State residents. There was one slight problem though. Scads of the newly insured couldn’t find primary care doctors to take care of them.

Wait times for routine office visits have soared in some parts of the state to 100 days and many residents have simply given up trying to find one.

These folks end up seeking care in ERs which is what they did before they were covered.

The problem scares the bejeesus out of officials in the Obama administration, who know that if the Big O has his way and 40-50 million Americans acquire health insurance in the blink of an eye, the same problem will play itself out nationwide.
 
What to do? Some suggest bumping medical school enrollment which would begin addressing the problem around the time the Big O wraps-up his second term, and that’s assuming any of the new graduates actually enter primary care.

Others recommend increased utilization of nurse practitioners and physician assistants, but last time we checked all these types are already happily employed, and training new ones is associated with lag time problems of its own.

Solutions with a quicker onset of action include expanding RN-staffed retail clinics with leveraged physician oversight, and opening the doors even more widely to foreign medical graduates.

Some even suggest overhauling the payment structure for physicians in a way that incents specialists to do some primary care.

Assuming policymakers have the stomach to take on physician payment reform in a way that doesn’t cause system-wide costs to skyrocket, the idea won’t go down well with specialists, regardless.

Listen to Peter Mandell, for example. The spokesman for the American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons told the New York Times, “we have no problem with financial incentives for primary care (but) if there’s less money for hip and knee replacements, fewer of them will be done for people who need them.”

Just 6 years after scientists decoded the human genome, a line of research derived from the breakthrough known as personal genomic medicine is increasingly perceived to be an expensive bear with an uncertain future, according to commentaries in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Since the heralded announcement in 2003, geneticists have undertaken hundreds of genomewide association studies designed to compare the DNA of healthy people with those of patients having specific diseases.

The hope was to pinpoint a handful of culprit genes and by association, biochemical processes that could become targets for disease-modifying drugs, immune therapy or what have you.

But the studies appear capable of explaining just a fraction of the genetic component underlying complex diseases like cancer, schizophrenia and diabetes.

The problem, it seems, has been the assumption that such conditions were promoted by variations in a small number of genes, say 10. Instead, thousands of genes appear to be involved, with multiple variations at each locus exerting myriad effects on other genes and their variants.  

The snafu represents a setback for personal genomics companies that hoped to inform customers about their risk for these diseases.

“With few exceptions, what the genomics companies are doing right now is recreational genomics,” Duke University geneticist David Goldstein told the New York Times. “The information has little or…no clinical relevance.”

In his NEJM piece, Goldstein therefore recommends a strategic shift in genomics research towards decoding the entire DNA of patients with certain diseases.

But Peter Kraft and David Hunter of the Harvard School of Public Health, publishing in the same issue, remain optimistic about genomewide association studies.

“There will be more common variants to find,” Hunter told the Times. “It would be unfortunate if we gave up now.”

Everyone agrees that controlling health care cost escalation is vital to cutting our budget deficit.

The problem is that no one agrees how to do it, and yesterday’s kumbayah press release by key stakeholders certainly hasn’t addressed the issue substantively.

The Big O has already ticked-off Big Insurance by cutting payments to Medicare Advantage plans, and the $1.1 billion he tucked into his Economic Hail Mary for comparative effectiveness research has garnered similarly negative reviews from Big Pharma and the Device Makers.

Obama believes cost-effectiveness research can help physicians reduce wasteful or ineffective treatments, especially if they are reminded about the findings at time they write orders.

This could be done by incorporating reminder systems into those newfangled EMRs he’s incentivizing physicians to adopt.

The Hail Mary allocated $400 million to the National Institutes of Health, $300 million to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and another $400 million to Health and Human Services.

This amounts to a budget increase, not a policy shift for AHRQ. For example, its 2007 guide to pain medication for osteoarthritis explained how a 30-day supply of Lodine cost $170 whereas the same course of treatment with aspirin cost $10.

And CMS has long-since established the precedent of using AHRQ-sponsored research in reaching coverage decisions for Medicare and Medicaid.

Still, the decision raised red flags for Big Pharma, whose trade group was one of the signees in yesterday’s kumbaya press release, and the device makers as well.

Teresa Lee, a VP at the Advanced Medical Technology Association, warned the Wall Street Journal for example that using “this research to deny access to appropriate treatments for patients with (specific) medical histories and needs should not be the objective.”

And on the Hill, Republican Senator Jon Kyl just missed passing legislation that would have prevented CMS from relying on comparative effectiveness research to deny coverage.

Charles Grassley and Russ Feingold, 2 key actors in health reform legislation, voted for that one.