Layoffs at the genetic testing startup affected about 25% of the company, says one well-placed source.
Counsyl, the company that offers a slew of genetic tests, made significant cuts in its product, design, sales, marketing and engineering teams, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Instead of relying on the small number of patients who go to research hospitals, doctors are recruiting huge numbers of participants online.
Nearly 40% of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes, with about 1.7 million of those cases expected in 2016 in the United States (according to the National Cancer Institute). These patients are hoping for better treatments and, hopefully someday, cures. They could also be valuable resources, helping experts develop better therapies, if only staff at research centers like Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston could study their unique cases. Even patients with the same diagnosis, such as breast cancer, have different genetic makeups, both in their healthy cells and in their tumors. These differences provide clues to new genetic factors that may cause the disease, why some patients respond especially well to certain treatments, why some tumors are so resistant to treatment, and how people of different ages or ethnicities are affected.
Amazon made several very smart decisions early in the voice platform’s life that may make it a friendlier ecosystem for device makers.
If Amazon’s Alexa had just served as a entry point to Amazon’s marketplace, it would have been as boring as the failed Amazon Fire smartphone. But Alexa is way more than that.
…And everything to do with politics.
On Friday, the Justice Department renewed its efforts in a Brooklyn court to force Apple to help break into a drug trafficker’s iPhone, a move that Apple believes is just another attempt to establish a legal precedent that would make such demands on tech companies easier in the future.
With PYPO (Put Your Pretty On), an online comedy platform for women, Stephanie Laing is trying to provide opportunities that she never had.
Stephanie Laing recalls the moment she started to think about doing more than just producing some of the most popular comedies on television—such as Eastbound and Down, the first four seasons of Veep, and Danny McBride’s upcoming HBO series Vice Principals. Her daughter was four at the time, and they were rushing out the door to go somewhere. Suddenly her daughter stopped. “Hold on,” she said, “I have to put my pretty on.”
With a new tool called “Capture,” Giphy furthers its quest to own the entire GIF ecosystem.
When Giphy launched three years ago, it was a simple search engine that allowed you to locate GIFs of pop culture moments—Jennifer Lawrence tripping on the red carpet, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” dance, Drake’s epic dance moves—so that you could easily plop them into Facebook, Twitter, or text messages.
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