March 4th - Dan Hoffe B’89, the Program Chair for March, introduced Jeff Hazelton of BioLucid.  BioLucid is a Digital Health company and an industry leader in the mHealth (mobile health) sector.  BioLucid is located in “the Hub” and is the largest employer of Ringling College of Art & Design students in the country.  Steve Jobs said:  “The biggest innovations of the 21st century are going to be at the intersection of biology and technology”.  BioLucid is focused on creating products at the intersection of digital health and digital art.  Hazelton described the companies’ employees as a triangle comprised of equal parts artists, scientists and programmers.  He noted that digital health is currently one of the fastest growing investment sectors which surpassed $1.9B in 2013.  Hazelton was part of the group that founded BioLucid in 2001.  Initially BioLucid produced movies to show the mechanism of the action of drugs for large pharmaceutical companies.   More recently, BioLucid has developed “Living Medical Environments” or LME’s.  A LME is an interactive visual experience of a living process, such as an organ, or a biologic structure.  It is the merging of science and artistry into an immersive experience that makes any concept simple, memorable, and relevant.   LME’s can be run on iPads and enable physicians and surgeons to visually and more effectively communicate with their patients one conversation at a time.  We were able to experience this through the “Understanding ACS” Living Medical Environment, which explains acute cardiac syndrome.  With this LME, you are able to go deep inside the heart down to the blood vessel where the doctor can show the blockage that is present and then, if desired, even further down to the cellular level.  A surgeon can use this LME to personalize his explanation in showing the patient how the prescribed medication will work in his body. Another LME we experienced was, Living Lung – Anatomy and Disease that enables the user to see the lung breathing and turn it transparent; the doctor can choose asthma or COPD for the presentation. The visual, interactive nature of the LME experience cuts across all language barriers and has helped the company to expand globally and is currently being used by physicians in 38 countries around the world.  If you are interested in learning more, please check out their website at www.biolucid.com.

March 18th - Dan Hoffe introduced Peter Simonson, the President of Juvent.  Simonson, an engineer, began as a distributor of spinal implants.  He developed a better product and sold his company to Medtronic.  Then he and his brother helped a surgeon to identify the protein that is the biological marker for back pain.  They sold that company to Johnson & Johnson.  Then, realizing that science is far ahead of medicine, he and his brother looked for other opportunities to use scientific advances for medical purposes.  They decided to focus on osteoporosis, which is the seventh most common medical condition in the world, and with a team of researchers from several universities they determined to fill a void in the medical field, namely, bone health.  They focused on the primary function of the skeleton, which is not structural but metabolic.  They found that impact force is vital to a healthy skeleton.  It can be in the form of major force such as from running with non-padded shoes but can just as effectively be accomplished through a series of minimal impacts. One source of such impacts is the natural operation of muscles.  Studies showed that a lot of symptoms disappear when the skeleton gets impact force.  Simonson cited a Swiss study that found that most of the exercises demonstrating a significant effect on bone are those with impact, whereas exercises such as swimming or bicycling exert no impact on bone.  Simonson then demonstrated the Juvent machine, which resembles an oversize bathroom scale.  The machine delivers vertical motion the width of two human hairs.  Standing on the machine for twenty minutes a day three days a week can work wonders on bone issues, arthritis and joint pain. Juvent is developing machines for three types of patients – athletes (especially championship golfers), patients with bone and bone-related disease and children recovering from chemotherapy.  One local assisted living facility has purchased two of the machines, which are in use eight hours a day, and is purchasing a third machine, because its residents find it so effective.

Thursday, April 3rd -  Luncheon Meeting, Salute! Ristorante, speaker: Member Jeff Tibbs on the economy;  $22. For reservations, call Secretary Valerie Grey at 484-7834. (Note:  This is the correct time and place information for this event. The printed version of the April Ivy notes contains a misprint.)