Dear clients and friends: Given your interest in health and medicine, we would like to share with you our collection of the most interesting perspectives on our industry's trends and developments. We are happy to share them with you — and hope you share your thoughts with us.

1. Can Employers Reduce Health Inequity?

Writing in Harvard Business Review, a team of executives from SCAN Health Plan share how they reduced health disparities within their organization. Their approach – which included tying executives’ bonuses to progress – offers lessons:

We reduced the racial and ethnic medication adherence gap by 35%, the equivalent of roughly 700 more Black and Hispanic members taking their medications as prescribed, which potentially is helping to prevent heart attacks, strokes, and deaths.

Before we put a plan in place to address the disparity issue, we knew we had to make it clear that this was a top organizational priority. So we tied 10% of our senior managers’ annual bonuses to their success in reducing differences in medication-adherence rates. As a result, members of our senior management team prioritized their departments’ focuses and pursued new cross-functional collaborations in order to achieve the organization’s goal.

2. Can Jiminy Cricket Detect Cancer?

MIT Technology Review spotlights what must be the coolest study of 2022: using cyborg locust brains to detect cancer. The researchers are optimistic the findings will support a future breath test that can detect subtle changes that indicate cancer:

“These changes are almost in parts per trillion,” says Saha, a neural engineer at Michigan State University. This makes them hard to pick up even with state-of-the-art technologies, he adds. But animals have evolved to interpret such subtle changes in scents. So he and his colleagues decided to “hijack” an animal brain instead.

[Much like cancer-sniffing dogs,] the locusts’ brains responded to each of the [cancer] cell types differently. The patterns of electrical activity recorded were so distinct that when the team puffed the gas from one cell type onto the antennae, they could correctly identify whether the cells were cancerous from the recording alone. It is the first time a living insect brain has been tested as a tool to detect cancer.

3. Stop Us If You Heard This Before

Here we go again: another big piece on how technology is going to “disrupt” healthcare. Yawn. But when The Economist cries wolf, we can’t help but listen:

Between 2019 and 2021 Alphabet’s venture-capital arms, Google Ventures and Gradient Ventures, and its private-equity unit, CapitalG, made about 100 deals, a quarter of Alphabet’s combined total, in life sciences and health care. So far this year it has injected $1.7bn into futuristic health ideas…leaving its fellow tech giants, which have invested around $100m all told, in the dust.

Alphabet is the fifth-highest-ranking business in the Nature Index, which measures the impact of scientific papers, in the area of life sciences, behind four giant drugmakers and 20 spots ahead of Microsoft, the only other tech giant in the running. The company has hired former health regulators to help it navigate America’s health-care bureaucracy.

Will it work? “Alphabet’s approach to innovation—throw lots of money at lots of projects—has served it well in some other businesses beyond its core search engine.”

4. The Universal Jab

We have the scientific capabilities to create a “pan-variant” COVID vaccine – one that could protect against all the variants. But in the US, bureaucratic and logistical roadblocks stand in the way. Patrick Collison, co-founder of Fast Grants, explains:

Overall, we [believe] the federal government should empower someone to intervene (as it did with Operation Warp Speed). Private actors can’t change FDA policy. In our view it is probably true that, with competent execution, we could roll out pan-variant COVID vaccines before the end of 2022. Actually making that happen would require significant and coordinated logistical, regulatory, and administrative action. However, it would by no means be impossible. Not having pan-variant vaccines in 2022 is best thought of as a choice.

5. Frozen

New York City has seen a 370% increase in confirmed Monkeypox cases over the past two weeks. Other cities are not far behind. But the vaccines are sitting in a Danish freezer. New York Mag’s Intelligencer investigates why:

It’s unclear why the FDA took so long to send inspectors to Denmark. The agency regularly conducted virtual inspections of drug facilities early in the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the agency’s guidance, and public-health activists are demanding answers. “Members of at risk communities are being turned away from monkeypox vaccination because these vaccines are not available in sufficient quantity in the U.S.,” wrote members of the advocacy group PrEP4All and Partners in Health in a letter to federal officials overseeing the outbreak response last week.