Methuselah revisited? It’s mainly business.

Many are familiar with the Biblical account of Methuselah, who lived to be 969 years old (Genesis 5:21-27). Now Google is investing in longevity, and we read, “the biggest percentage of Google Ventures’ assets are now invested in science and, in particular, oncology.”

Bill Maris, the president and managing partner of Google Ventures, said in a recent interview, “If you ask me today, is it possible to live to be 500? The answer is yes.”

Bloomberg goes on to note, however,

Google Ventures has close to $2 billion in assets under management, with stakes in more than 280 startups. Each year, Google gives Maris $300 million in new capital, and this year he’ll have an extra $125 million to invest in a new European fund.

That puts Google Ventures on a financial par with Silicon Valley’s biggest venture firms, which typically put to work $300 million to $500 million a year. According to data compiled by CB Insights, a research firm that tracks venture capital activity, Google Ventures was the fourth-most-active venture firm in the U.S. last year, participating in 87 deals.

A company with $66 billion in annual revenue isn’t doing this for the money. What Google needs is entrepreneurs.

“It needs to know where the puck is heading,” says Robert Peck, an analyst at the investment bank SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, who published a report in February examining Google’s outside investment units, including Google Ventures. “Look at what happened to BlackBerry when it missed the advent of smartphones. And Yahoo! missed Facebook.”

So the investment strategy is still sound by business measures. Even so, the investments are made with more human needs in mind: “There are a lot of billionaires in Silicon Valley, but in the end, we are all heading to the same place,” Maris says. “If given the choice between making a lot of money or finding a way to make people live longer, what do you choose?”

My Friend, Artist Dale Crum

I’ve been chatting with Steve Day, VP of Marketing at Cheetah Technologies – and I thought of this piece, done by my good friend, Artist Dale Crum.

Dale is available to design anything at all that you need, and the more striking you need it, the better. Dale can be reached at 901-552-8213, or on Twitter @DaleCrum77.

View his LinkedIn profile at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dale-crum/14/462/873.

Conjunction of planets?

I am out with the kids on the evening of May 26, to see the conjunction of planets (this is the best night to see this). There has not been a cloud in the sky all day, until just recently, when the only clouds that have appeared all day have shown up in the west.

My résumé is attached

Bugay-2013-Resume-REVISED-07-01

One year ago today, Beth had her stem cell transplant

On December 14, 2011, my wife, half-dead from a fight with leukemia, “intensive chemotherapy” and full-body radiation, received a new infusion of adult stem cells from a young female donor in Europe. She became radically sick – somehow she got hold of a MRSA infection in her blood; later she had other viral infections that nearly cost her life. She spent the better part of three months in the hospital. You can read more about this struggle in the pages below.

She is still weak, and doesn’t have the energy to do much at all. Her immune system perceives her body as “foreign”, and so she is still taking some anti-rejection medications, which keep the immune system suppressed. So she’s still susceptible to pneumonia and other infections. She is looking forward with great anticipation to celebrating Christmas with her family. In another few months, they’ll start to give her the full cycle of baby vaccinations.

In a series of “Chimerism” tests which measure the level of the donor’s DNA vs her own DNA in her blood cells, she has consistently been “100% donor in all three cell lines”. That indicates no sign that the leukemia is coming back. The longer she shows such results, the closer she comes to being declared “cured” (a happy event which happens after two years).

The best news of all is that, over the last year, she has come to a new understanding of how the Lord Jesus Christ saves us in spite of anything else we might do to help or hurt that process, and is becoming deeply engaged in the life of our church.

Again, I’d like to thank all of you who helped us through this very demanding time with your prayers and your support.

Overheard today

“I’d rather go through chemotherapy than go Christmas shopping”. Yeah, that was Beth today. The thing to do is, while she’s in the middle of her chemo next week, ask her “would you rather be doing this, or go Christmas shopping?” Somebody please remind me that I need to ask her that … 🙂

Beth’s donor has signed, and we now have a transplant schedule

I got a call yesterday afternoon from Renee, the transplant coordinator at West Penn. Beth’s donor has signed all the necessary paperwork, and a date of December 14 has been set for the transplant. That means, working backward from that date, the following schedule has been established:

December 5-7: Outpatient treatment at West Penn’s Medical Short Stay unit. Beth will be treated with a drug called Kepivance, the purpose of which is to prevent “mucositis” – mouth sores – one of the more severe side effects of the chemotherapy drugs that Beth will receive. This is an intravenous treatment.

December 8: Beth will be admitted to West Penn’s “T-7” floor – the Hematology/Oncology (or “hem/onc”) unit.

December 8-12: She’ll receive the “intensive” chemotherapy, also called “conditioning”. She’ll receive two or three intravenous drugs spread out over these five days:

Fludarabine: “It has been unofficially and casually referred to as “AIDS in a bottle” amongst healthcare professionals due to its significant immunosuppresive activity”.

Busulfan: “Currently, its main uses are in bone marrow transplantation, … where it is used as a conditioning drug. Busulfan can control tumor burden but cannot prevent transformation or correct cytogenic abnormalities”. To put this into perspective, the Vidaza that Beth was receiving had two functions: it had a cytotoxic effect – it killed things – but it was also supposed to enable her to make her own blood cells (a thing it never did).

Thymoglobulin: I don’t know if Beth is getting this one; it’s on the transplant sheet that Dr Rossetti gave to us, but Renee yesterday said Beth was getting two chemo drugs. Thymoglobulin “very substantially reduces immune competence in patients with normal immune systems”.

December 13-14: Total Body Irradiation (200 cGy).

The donor will undergo five or six days of Neupogen injections “to move stem cells from bone marrow to peripheral blood”. She will then undergo one or two days worth of “collection” – a four- to six-hour process by which blood will be withdrawn from one arm, will flow through a filtering device (similar to a dialysis machine) that will collect only stem cells, and the remaining blood will be re-infused into the other arm.

The stem cells will then be flown into Pittsburgh, where a (we hope) properly-“conditioned” Beth will be awaiting their arrival. The donor is a young female, and she is not from the United States. That’s all we may know about her at this time. I may have mentioned earlier, that we found three “10/10” matches. This is out of 10 million US-based donors, and an international database of seven million donors. For more information on this, see http://www.marrow.org.

It’s interesting to me that they call this procedure a “transplant” – but really, it’s like a slow motion transplant – a damaged organ (in this case, the bone marrow) is removed, slowly, and a new organ, in the form of stem cells, is “transplanted”, albeit slowly.

Home at last

… After a 12 hour day. We left 7:45, to arrive 8:30, to check in at 9:00. The blood draws — all those 21 vials of blood, actually went very quickly. The bone marrow biopsy, scheduled for 10:00 am, got started around noon. Beth was back in the room, then we had to wait for the three units (a unit of platelets and two units of A+). All in all, a very long and uneventful day.

I counted 21

Beth does not yet have a “central line”, and she hasn’t wanted to get one, because when they do the transplant, they’ll have to put a new one in anyway.

So when Beth has blood taken, they have to use a vein in her arm. As a result of the twice-weekly blood draws, plus all the transfusions, not to mention the Vidaza shots and IVs, she is pretty bruised up.

So the nurse is now looking for an IV specialist, to find a good vein.

Bone Marrow Biopsy Today

Watch this space for details, although I suspect that, given that this is now Beth’s 4th one of these, there will not be very much exciting happening. We’re headed down to West Penn’s Medical Short Stay unit, which is essentially a floor full of outpatient single-day hospital rooms. She’ll have a blood test and we’ll get some lab results; the biopsy is at 10:00 am, and again, Beth will go under “conscious sedation” or what’s otherwise known as a “twilight” sedative. She slept through the last one – it became painful a day later as all the sedatives wore off. While she experienced a tremendous amount of pain at some of her earlier bone marrow biopsies, she came back from the last one with no complaints at all.