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brandonb
9,339karma·1,335submissions·January 17, 2011
about
Data for good.
Co-Founder at Empirical Health (https://empirical.health). Don't die of heart disease.
Before: Co-Founder @ Cardiogram (ML for heart health)
CTO at Sift Science (YC S11, machine learning to fight fraud)
Data Science @ UCSF Cardiology
HealthCare.gov rescue team
Google (Android speech recognition, search ads ML)
brandonb.cc
recent activity (1,335 total)
7 pts
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Congrats on the launch. I always love to see smart ML founders applying their talents to health and bio. What were the biggest challenges in getting major pharma companies onboard? How do you think it…
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The thing that took the most time was normalizing biomarker names and units across labs. Even for the same lab chain (say, Quest), you'll get the same biomarker with slightly different names (e.g…
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Lepodisiran has reduced Lp(a) by 94% in clinical trails. After it gets approved, IMO the author should re-write this section.
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I started a company that does exactly that (except we also have doctors who can prescribe the medications, not just LLMs). So I don't think the approach you describe is naive, but others might. :…
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I think there's a a bit of a paradox here: cardiovascular disease is solved biomedically, yet still remains the #1 cause of death worldwide. From a biomedical standpoint, we have highly accurate …
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There are multiple independent risk factors for heart disease. The major ones are: - LDL / ApoB
- Blood pressure
- inflammation (hs-CRP)
- Insulin resistance (HbA1c)
- Lp(a): stronges…
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I think the title is deliberately provocative, but they're not wrong. Heart disease is largely solvable from a biomedical standpoint: we have accurate biomarkers (e.g., ApoB, Lp(a), hs-CRP), long…
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The main side effects of statins are muscle pain and brain fog (from some statins -- others cross the blood-brain barrier much less). The benefit of statins is to not only lower LDL cholesterol, but a…
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This is cool! It'd be interesting to correlate this with Vitamin D too.