Inside Seattle's life sciences boom

Five years ago, when Dr. Leslie Alexandre arrived in Seattle to lead the industry group Life Science Washington, she found a community in a mild state of shock. "One of the real challenges was our ecosystem had tons of great research going on, and many wonderful companies, but I think our industry…

Testing Amazon's COVID Test

Amazon made headlines at the height of the pandemic for developing its own COVID-19 testing system for its workers. The same test is now available to the public for $40. You can order the test on Amazon.com, take it at home and ship it to Amazon to get your results.  So what is it like to take Ama…

What it's like to use Amazon Pharmacy

Amazon's move into healthcare is multifaceted, including COVID-19 testing, its Halo health band and service, cloud services for healthcare and life sciences, and even primary care for its employees. A major motivation for the company: the sheer size of the healthcare market, and the massive proble…

Son's rare disease inspires dad to disrupt drug development

Before their son was born, Sanath Kumar Ramesh and his wife Ramya had normal first-time-parent jitters. Ramesh, who works for Amazon as a software engineering manager, was so excited to welcome his little boy. He was ready for the challenges and rewards of parenthood. In August 2018, Raghav was bo…

How AI will accelerate the response to the next pandemic

The speed of the creation of vaccines for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 was a modern marvel. You might already have already gotten yours. But what if vaccines and therapeutics could emerge even faster in response to the next pandemic. That’s one of the goals of a $5 million gift from M…

Walter Isaacson on the gene editing revolution

Walter Isaacson has studied and written extensively about the physics and technology revolutions as the biographer of such figures as Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs. But after writing his latest book, he is convinced there's a far more momentous revolution in the works. "The next few decades are g…

Finding secrets of life in close brushes with death

To help people live, Mark Roth scrutinizes those who've come frighteningly close to dying. People who have been lost in the frozen wilderness in a Mount Rainier whiteout or stowed away in the wheel well of a trans-Pacific jet. People who have suffered massive heart attacks or body-crushing car wrec…

Testing a new COVID-19 test

GeekWire editor Todd Bishop: On a cold, clear weekday morning last month, my quest to figure out whether I had COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic took me to my back porch, where a mobile phlebotomist drew my blood. It had been 10 months since I was sick, and I had already received a negativ…

'Data saves lives': U.S. health systems unite behind new startup

A group of 14 U.S. health systems, representing tens of millions of patients across 40 states, will pool data using software developed by Seattle startup Truveta, leveraging artificial intelligence to search for medical breakthroughs and previously undetected patterns of inequity in healthcare. Th…

Halo Effect: Amazon, privacy, and the future of health

GeekWire editor Todd Bishop: A few weeks ago, I started wearing a new health band. It regularly eavesdrops on my side of conversations, and it has a lot of opinions about them. “You had three phrases that sounded annoyed, irritated or disgusted," a section in the app reported on a recent evening, …