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. The Virtual Kool-Aid Acid Test

What happens when a computational molecular physicist has a near-death experience after a nasty fall during a hike in the woods? He creates a VR program that replicates the “self-transcendent experience” of psychedelics, of course. The MIT Technology Reviewsees potential in his VR tool to replicate the effect of psychedelics:

[The VR program] elicited responses indistinguishable from those associated with medium doses of psychedelics. On the mystical experience scale, participants reported an experience as intense as that elicited by 20 milligrams of psilocybin or 200 micrograms of LSD, and stronger than that induced by microdoses of either substance.

But a microdose of skepticism is also in order: “The dominant theory on how psychedelics improve clinical outcomes (a debate far from settled) is that their effect is driven by both the subjective experience of a trip and the drug’s neurochemical effect on the brain. Since VR only mirrors the subjective experience, its clinical benefit, which has yet to be rigorously tested, may not be as strong.”

2. The Machine Will See You Now

Eric Topol doesn’t blink as he touts the potential of AI and deep learning to detect disease by analyzing retinal images. Topol arguesthat current evidence suggests “a particularly striking advance” across disease categories:

We should have known a few years back that something was rich (dare I say eye-opening) about the retina that humans, including retinal experts, couldn’t see. While there are far simpler ways to determine gender, it’s a 50-50 toss up for ophthalmologists, which means there are no visible cues to human eyes. But now two models have shown 97% accuracy of gender determination from neural network training. That was just the beginning.

3. “We’re at the Very, Very Beginning”

A decade ago, it cost a cool $10,000 to sequence a human genome. That could soon drop to $200. Patients might not see the benefit right away. But in a series of interviews, Wired finds some excited researchers:

In the early 2000s, when the Broad Institute started a project to search for genes related to schizophrenia, researchers had 10,000 genomes from people with the condition, which didn’t yield many insights. Now, they have amassed more than 150,000. Comparing those genomes to those of people without schizophrenia has allowed investigators to uncover multiple genes that have a profound impact on a person's risk of developing it. By being able to sequence more genomes faster and more cheaply, they’ll be able to find additional genes that have a more subtle effect on the condition. “Once you have bigger data, the signal becomes clearer.”

4. The Skinny on Weight-Loss Drugs

The scales might soon tip for anti-obesity treatment. A new class of diabetes medications, incretins, is proving effective in helping people lose weight. GQ reports:

Initially created to spur insulin production in diabetic patients, incretins often left participants in drug trials with two notable side effects: satiety and delayed gastric emptying. In other words, recipients feel full quicker, while food itself moves from stomach to intestine more slowly, which makes you feel even more full. The combination of those effects caused patients to eat less and consistently lose weight.

But barriers remain. One physician, who runs an obesity program, believes “most primary care doctors, unfortunately, still suffer from obesity stigma and bias.” And Medicare doesn’t cover anti-obesity meds. Like so much else with weight loss, it’s harder than it seems.

5. Pain Gains?

The Economist declares that modern medicine’s understanding of chronic pain is “still in the stone age”— yet there is also a range of promising research on new treatments:

Last month in Science Translational Medicine, [a team at Harvard Medical School] trawled through a list of 1,000 existing FDA-approved drugs to identify those that might [reduce tetrahydrobiopterin, a naturally occurring molecule correlated with pain]. After testing these drugs on mouse neurons, they identified one candidate—fluphenazine, previously prescribed for schizophrenia—that successfully inhibited not only tetrahydrobiopterin but pain too.

Researchers at Wake Forest School of Medicine [are researching] an opioid stripped of its addictive properties. … Tests in monkeys showed that primates could be distracted from the discomfort of a tail dipped in hot water by a dose of at-121 that was 100 times smaller than that amount of morphine required for the same analgesic effect. The monkeys were also in no rush to give themselves more of the drug, suggesting that its addictive properties could be low.