Business Insider s biggest healthcare stories for February 19 businessinsider.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from businessinsider.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
On Thursday, analysts at CB Insights wrote that they think consumer genetics company 23andMe has only scratched the surface of the market value of genomic and other personal sequencing data. Based on past research, the analysts predict investment in the space will continue to grow from 2020 s $7.1 billion to an estimated $7.4 billion this year.
Looking at funding activity through February 4, omics companies mapping out patient DNA, RNA, proteins, and metabolites have already publicly raised $692 million in equity funding less than halfway through the first quarter. Among them is Color, the San Francisco-based consumer genetics company that raised $167 million in a Series D round in early January. The company offers patient genotyping for cancer and heart conditions, but has since begun offering COVID-19 tests based on viral mRNA.
Last Friday, Shelby had a chat with Humana CEO Bruce Broussard.
Broussard told her about competing with some of the health-insurance startups taking on the red-hot Medicare Advantage market, like Oscar and Devoted.
Humana for its part has its own answer: a new venture called Author. It launched in 2021 in South Carolina, and already has 15,000 members, Broussard told Shelby.
Speaking of the insurance upstarts, Shelby and the graphics team here at Insider took a closer look at Medicare Advantage enrollment heading into 2021.
(It s pretty striking to see the enrollment numbers for giants like UnitedHealthcare stacked next to some of the tiny younger players.)
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Mark Cuban s new drug company has plans to slash drug prices by 90% or more.
Its CEO Dr. Alex Oshmyansky has been trying to do so for years, raising $1.3 million at Y Combinator in 2018.
It intends to cut high drug costs through transparent pricing and a new Dallas manufacturing facility that will finish packaging drugs for patient distribution.
Before launching with Y Combinator in 2018, Dallas radiologist Dr. Alex Oshymansky had been trying to lower the cost of generic drugs for years.
Under the name Osh s Affordable Pharmaceuticals, he set out in 2015 to manufacture low-cost rare disease drugs whose prices had shot up by 400 times or more.