He started the work over 10 years ago, when stem-cell research was raising hopes and controversy. Melton has a different approach: using stem cells to create replacement beta cells that produce insulin. Treatment can involve a lifetime of careful eating, insulin injections and multiple daily blood-glucose tests.

Type 1 diabetes affects 1.25 million Americans, but two in particular got Harvard biologist Doug Melton’s attention: his daughter Emma and son Sam. Jeffrey Klugerĭoug Melton: A stem-cell cure for diabetes

Evidation is partnering with Brigham and Women’s Hospital on the project. For founder Christine Lemke, one of Evidation’s ongoing projects, to see if new technologies can effectively measure chronic pain, is personal: Lemke has a rare genetic disease that causes frequent back pain. Evidation partners with drug manufacturers like Sanofi and Eli Lilly to parse that data that work has led to dozens of peer-reviewed studies already, on subjects ranging from sleep and diet to cognitive-health patterns. California-based Big Data firm Evidation has developed just such a tool, with information from 3 million volunteers providing trillions of data points. If there were a way to aggregate all that data from even a few million of us and make it all anonymous but searchable, medical researchers would have a powerful tool for drug development, lifestyle studies and more. There are 7.5 billion humans, and tens of millions of us track our health with wearables like smart watches, as well as with more traditional devices like blood-pressure monitors. And in Ghana and Rwanda, drones operated by Silicon Valley startup Zipline are already delivering medical supplies to rural villages. Wing, a division of Google’s parent company Alphabet, received similar, but more limited, FAA approval to make deliveries for both Walgreens and FedEx. UPS is not alone in pioneering air deliveries. “We expect UPS Flight Forward to one day be a very significant part of our company,” says UPS CEO David Abney of the service, which will deliver urine, blood and tissue samples, and medical essentials like drugs and transfusable blood. A fleet-footed runner could cover the distance almost as fast as the drones, but as a proof-of-concept program, it succeeded, and in October the FAA granted the company approval to expand to 20 hospitals around the U.S. Since March, UPS has been conducting a trial program called Flight Forward, using autonomous drone deliveries of critical medical samples including blood or tissue between two branches of a hospital in Raleigh, N.C., located 150 yards apart. David Abney: Drone-delivered medical supplies

How can innovation affect ways of life