Study raises red flags about corporatization of health care, OHSU investigator says

Changes in patient volume, billing after private equity firms acquire physician practices

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OREGON HEALTH & SCIENCE UNIVERSITY

New research reveals private equity firms that acquire physician-owned medical practices appear to be imposing measures to squeeze out more profits.

After they were acquired by private equity firms, the clinics saw more patients and billed more for visits among a large, commercially insured population, according to a study published today in JAMA Health Forum by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University and other institutions.

Researchers examined a total of 578 physician practices specializing in dermatology, gastroenterology and ophthalmology that were acquired by private equity firms across the U.S. from 2016 to 2020.

“The reason this is of concern to patients and policymakers is that private equity is often driven by profit margins of 20% or more,” said senior author Jane M. Zhu, M.D., assistant professor of medicine (general internal medicine and geriatrics) in the OHSU School of Medicine. “To do that, they have to generate higher revenues or reduce costs. Increasing private equity in these physician practices may be a symptom of the continuing corporatization of health care.”

It’s not clear whether these practices hurt clinical outcomes for patients. However, the findings raise concerning parallels with the rapid growth of private equity acquisition of nursing homes and hospital systems.

“Private equity investment in nursing homes has been associated with an increase in short-term mortality and changes to staffing,” the authors write, citing previous research.

In the new study, researchers found an increase in the overall number of patients seen in these clinics. The study also reviewed commercial insurance claims data that showed an increased share of visits longer than 30 minutes, even though the complexity of cases remained similar to cases before acquisition.

“These billing patterns could mean more efficient documentation of services provided, or it could mean upcoding or up-charging insurance companies to make more money,” Zhu said.

She believes more evidence is needed about how private equity impacts practice patterns.

Policymakers are taking note of these trends.

In Oregon, for example, lawmakers have established a Health Care Market Oversight program to review proposed mergers, acquisitions and other business deals to ensure they meet the state’s goals around health equity, lower consumer costs, increased access and better care.

A recent estimate by the same study team found that approximately 5% of physicians are currently employed by private equity-owned practices. Researchers cited quality of care and patient satisfaction as key areas for future research as this trend continues.

“Private equity ownership of physician practices has added a distinctly private and market-driven influence to the broader trends in corporate consolidation of physicians by health systems and insurers,” they concluded. “This study contributes evidence for potential overutilization and higher spending of care that will be important for policymakers to monitor.”

In addition to Zhu, co-authors include Yashaswini Singh, M.P.A., and Daniel Polsky, Ph.D., M.P.P., of Johns Hopkins University; and Zirui Song, M.D., Ph.D., and Joseph D. Bruch, Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School.

The study was supported by the National Institute for Healthcare Management Foundation and the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award, DPS-ODO24564. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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JOURNAL

JAMA Health Forum

DOI

10.1001/jamahealthforum.2022.2886 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Association of Private Equity Acquisition of Physician Practices With Changes in Health Care Spending and Utilization

Research unlocks secrets of native rodents' rat race to new lands

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: A SMOKY MOUSE (PSEUDOMYS FUMEUS) IN THE GRAMPIANS-GARIWERD NATIONAL PARK, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA. view more 

CREDIT: DAVID PAUL/MUSEUMS VICTORIA

New research from The Australian National University (ANU) has mapped the DNA from more than 150 species of native rodents from across Australia, New Guinea and Melanesian islands, painting a clearer picture of how they’re related and how they ended up spreading across the Pacific.  

Lead author Dr Emily Roycroft said native rodents are a fascinating but often under-appreciated evolutionary group. 

“There are over 150 species in Australia and New Guinea that aren’t found anywhere else in the world, like the rakali – or ‘water rat’ - that’s often seen swimming around Canberra’s lakes,” Dr Roycroft said. 

“Until now, we’ve known very little about the evolution and origin of native rodents, especially species in New Guinea.” 

The team used a new approach to get DNA from museum specimens up to 180 years old, including many extinct and elusive species. 

“One specimen of Guadalcanal rat from the Solomon Islands dates back to the 1880s, and the species hasn’t been seen since. It’s listed as critically endangered, and very possibly already extinct. We were curious to revisit these old specimens using modern technology,” Dr Roycroft said.  

The research shows that mountain formation in New Guinea five million years ago was the trigger for the spread of native rodents across the region. The expansion of New Guinea opened up new environments for rodents to adapt to, including through increased connectivity with Australia, Solomon Islands and Maluku Islands.  

“We’ve known for some time that Australia’s native rodents originated in Asia and arrived in our region via water – possibly a single pregnant animal floating across on a piece of driftwood. Now we have an accurate timeline for this, and an explanation for why we see so many species today,” Dr Roycroft said. 

“Our study shows native rodents are exceptional at colonising new areas. When they first arrived in Australia they adapted to a lot of new environments – including the arid desert.  

According to Dr Roycroft, having extra information about native rodents’ history could prove vital to the future of these species. 

“Native rodents have a deep intrinsic value in our ecosystems. They’re ecosystem engineers; they aerate soil via burrowing and foraging and they help to disperse seeds and fungal spores,” she said. 

“They also play a role in food webs as an important source for native predators, and in turn they feed on plants, fungi and smaller animals themselves. 

“But they also have the highest extinction rate of any Australian mammal group, due to extreme habitat loss and introduced predators. If we lose even one native species, it can throw off the balance in an ecosystem.  

“Understanding how our native rodents evolved and adapted will help us to conserve those we have left.” 

The research was supported by funding from Bioplatforms Australia through the Australian Government National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). \

The study has been published in Current Biology. 

 

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JOURNAL

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2022.08.021 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animal tissue samples

ARTICLE TITLE

New Guinea uplift opens ecological opportunity across a continent

New study confirms ‘rippled sheet’ protein structure predicted in 1953

UCSC scientists reported three crystal structures of periodic rippled beta sheets, a novel protein structure with potential applications in biomedicine and materials science

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SANTA CRUZ

 

IMAGE: THE RIPPLED BETA SHEET IS A VARIATION ON THE PLEATED BETA SHEET, A WELL-KNOWN STRUCTURAL MOTIF FOUND IN THOUSANDS OF PROTEINS. LINUS PAULING AND ROBERT COREY DESCRIBED THE RIPPLED BETA SHEET IN 1953, BUT IT REMAINED A LARGELY THEORETICAL STRUCTURE FOR DECADES. SCIENTISTS HAVE NOW CREATED RIPPLED SHEETS IN THE LABORATORY AND CHARACTERIZED THE STRUCTURE USING X-RAY CRYSTALLOGRAPHY. view more 

CREDIT: IMAGE CREDIT: J. RASKATOV

An unusual protein structure known as a “rippled beta sheet,” first predicted in 1953, has now been created in the laboratory and characterized in detail using x-ray crystallography.

The new findings, published in July in Chemical Science, may enable the rational design of unique materials based on the rippled sheet architecture.

“Our study establishes the rippled beta sheet layer configuration as a motif with general features and opens the road to structure-based design of unique molecular architectures, with potential for materials development and biomedical applications,” said Jevgenij Raskatov, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC Santa Cruz and corresponding author of the paper.

Proteins come in an enormous range of shapes and sizes to carry out their myriad structural and functional roles in living cells. Certain common structural motifs, such as the alpha helix, are found in many protein structures.

The rippled sheet is a variation on the pleated beta sheet, a well-known structural motif found in thousands of proteins. Linus Pauling and Robert Corey described the rippled beta sheet in 1953, two years after introducing the concept of the pleated beta sheet. While the pleated beta sheet is well known and often called simply the beta sheet, the rippled sheet remained a largely theoretical structure for decades.

In a previous study published in 2021, Raskatov's team reported obtaining a rippled beta sheet structure by mixing a small peptide with equal amounts of its mirror image. The researchers used mirror-image forms of triphenylalanine, a short peptide consisting of three phenylalanine amino acids. The mirror-image peptides joined in pairs to form "dimers" with the predicted structure, but they did not form the extended, periodic rippled beta-sheet layer topography hypothesized by Pauling and Corey.

"The dimers packed together into herringbone layer structures, which raised doubt as to whether the periodic rippled beta-sheet layer configuration was viable," Raskatov said.

In the new study, the researchers substituted other amino acids for one of the triphenylalanines to create slightly different tripeptides and their mirror-images. Using these new tripeptides, they were able to create three different aggregating peptide systems that formed extended antiparallel rippled beta sheet layers, in which mirror-image peptide strands were arranged in alternating fashion. The results of x-ray crystallography showed that the crystal structures are in excellent overall agreement with the predictions made by Pauling and Corey.

The co-first authors of the paper are Amaruka Hazari, a staff scientist in Raskatov’s lab, and Michael Sawaya at UCLA. Other coauthors include Timothy Johnstone at UC Santa Cruz and Niko Vlahakis, David Boyer, Jose Rodriguez, and David Eisenberg at UCLA. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

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JOURNAL

Chemical Science

DOI

10.1039/d2sc02531k 

ARTICLE TITLE

The rippled b-sheet layer configuration—a novel supramolecular architecture based on predictions by Pauling and Corey

nTIDE August 2022 Jobs Report: Employment indicators virtually unchanged for people with disabilities despite concerns about recession

National Trends in Disability Employment (nTIDE) – Issued semi-monthly by Kessler Foundation and the University of New Hampshire

Reports and Proceedings

KESSLER FOUNDATION

 

IMAGE: THIS GRAPHIC COMPARES THE LABOR MARKET INDICATORS FOR JULY 2022 AND AUGUST 2022, SHOWING SLIGHT INCREASES IN THE EMPLOYMENT-TO-POPULATION RATIO AND LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION RATE FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES, WHILE THESE INDICATORS DECLINED SLIGHTLY FOR PEOPLE WITHOUT DISABILITIES. view more 

CREDIT: KESSLER FOUNDATION

East Hanover, NJ – September 2, 2022 – Despite concerns about the impact of inflation, employment indicators remained virtually unchanged, according to today’s National Trends in Disability Employment – Monthly Update (nTIDE), issued by Kessler Foundation and the University of New Hampshire’s Institute on Disability (UNH-IOD). NTIDE experts observed that this lack of movement may reflect the early impact of countermeasures aimed at slowing the pace of inflation.  

Month-to-Month nTIDE Numbers (comparing July 2022 to August 2022)

In the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Jobs Report released today, the employment-to-population ratio for people with disabilities (ages 16-64) increased slightly from 34.4 percent in July to 34.6 percent in August (up 0.6 percent or 0.2 percentage points). For people without disabilities (ages 16-64), the employment-to-population ratio decreased slightly from 75.0 percent in July to 74.6 percent in August (down 0.5 percent or 0.4 percentage points). The employment-to-population ratio, a key indicator, reflects the percentage of people who are working relative to the total population (the number of people working divided by the number of people in the total population multiplied by 100).

“The employment-to-population ratio for people with disabilities has remained steadily above historic highs for the past twelve months,” said John O’Neill, PhD, director of the Center for Employment and Disability Research at Kessler Foundation. “This is encouraging for now,” he added, “considering the growing concerns about recession.”

Findings were similar for August’s labor force participation rate. For people with disabilities (ages 16-64), the labor force participation rate increased slightly from 37.3 percent in July to 37.6 percent in August (up 0.8 percent or 0.3 percentage points). For people without disabilities (ages 16-64), the labor force participation rate decreased slightly from 77.8 percent in July to 77.5 percent in August (down 0.4 percent or 0.3 percentage points). The labor force participation rate is the percentage of the population that is working, not working, and on temporary layoff, or not working and actively looking for work.

“The lack of movement in these labor market indicators may be an early sign of the impact of anti-inflationary measures taken by the U.S. Federal Reserve to slow the economy,” remarked Andrew Houtenville, PhD, professor of economics and the research director of the UNH-IOD. “Historically, impacts on the labor market lag behind movements in economic growth such as movement in gross domestic product (GDP). We would not expect to see large changes in employment and labor force participation until after we see declines in economic growth,” explained Dr. Houtenville.

Year-to-Year nTIDE Numbers (Comparing August 2021 to August 2022)

The employment-to-population ratio for working-age people with disabilities increased from 31.5 percent in August to 34.6 percent in August (up 9.8 percent or 3.1 percentage points). For working-age people without disabilities, the employment-to-population ratio also increased from 72.9 percent in August to 74.6 percent in August (up 2.3 percent or 1.7 percentage points).

Similarly, for people with disabilities (16-64), the labor force participation rate increased from 35.6 percent in August to 37.6 percent in August (up 5.6 percent or 2 percentage points). For people without disabilities (ages 16-64), the labor force participation rate also increased from 76.8 percent in August to 77.5 percent in August (up 0.9 percent or 0.7 percentage points).                                                                 

In August, among workers ages 16-64, the 5,583,000 workers with disabilities represented 3.8 percent of the total 148,206,000 workers in the U.S.                                                                                                         

Ask Questions about Disability and Employment

Each nTIDE release is followed by an nTIDE Lunch & Learn online webinar. This live broadcast, hosted via Zoom Webinar, offers attendees Q&A on the latest nTIDE findings, provides news and updates from the field, as well as invited panelists to discuss current disability-related findings and events. On September 2 at 12:00 pm Eastern, Jutta Treviranus, PhD, director, Inclusive Design Research Centre, OCAD University, Toronto, Ontario, joins Drs. Houtenville and O’Neill, and Denise Rozell, Policy Strategist at Association of University Centers on Disabilities (AUCD). Join our Lunch & Learns live or visit the nTIDE archives at: ResearchonDisability.org/nTIDE.

nTIDE COVID Update

Join us on September 23, at 12:00 pm Eastern for the mid-month COVID update – an in-depth comparison of the latest unemployment numbers for people with and without disabilities. Register at: COVID-19 Updates - 2022 | Center for Research on Disability.

NOTE: The statistics in the nTIDE are based on Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers but are not identical. They are customized by UNH to combine the statistics for men and women of working age (16 to 64). nTIDE is funded, in part, by grants from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) (90RT5037) and Kessler Foundation.

About the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire

The Institute on Disability (IOD) at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) was established in 1987 to provide a university-based focus for the improvement of knowledge, policies, and practices related to the lives of persons with disabilities and their families. For information on the NIDILRR-funded Research and Training Center on Disability Statistics, visit ResearchOnDisability.org.

About Kessler Foundation

Kessler Foundation, a major nonprofit organization in the field of disability, is a global leader in rehabilitation research that seeks to improve cognition, mobility, and long-term outcomes – including employment – for people with neurological disabilities caused by diseases and injuries of the brain and

spinal cord. Kessler Foundation leads the nation in funding innovative programs that expand opportunities for employment for people with disabilities. For more information, visit KesslerFoundation.org.

CAPTION

This graphic compares the labor market indicators for August 2021 and August 2022, showing increases for people with and without disabilities.

CREDIT

Kessler Foundation

Stay Connected with Kessler Foundation

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To interview an expert, contact:

Deborah Hauss, DHauss@kesslerfoundation.org;

Carolann Murphy, CMurphy@KesslerFoundation.org.

Graphics:

Title: nTIDE Month-to-Month Comparison of Labor Market Indicators for People with and without Disabilities

Caption: This graphic compares the labor market indicators for July 2022 and August 2022, showing slight increases in the employment-to-population ratio and labor force participation rate for people with disabilities, while these indicators declined slightly for people without disabilities.

Title: nTIDE Year-to-Year Comparison of Labor Market Indicators for People with and without Disabilities

Caption: This graphic compares the labor market indicators for August 2021 and August 2022, showing increases for people with and without disabilities.

How historical precedents impeded recognition of airborne COVID-19 transmission

Reviewing over 2,000 years of history, a new study explains why it took so long to recognize airborne transmission of the coronavirus, and how we can do better next time

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER

Millions of people have died of coronavirus infection since 2020 because influential institutions took too long to recognize that it is primarily airborne, and a new University of Colorado Boulder-led historical analysis sheds light on the delay. The authors trace this deadly resistance one hundred years back in history, to the rejection of sickly air called “miasma,” the rise of germ theory and our own stubborn tendency to retain beliefs in spite of accumulating evidence to the contrary.

While the SARS-CoV-2 virus was invisibly infecting people in 2020 through the air in hospitals, churches, workplaces and restaurants, people across the world were focused on disinfecting surfaces and washing their hands. Many governments and businesses installed plexiglass barriers that actually increased coronavirus spread, said Jose-Luis Jimenez, lead author of a new comprehensive historical assessment of major medical mistakes involving disease transmission, now published in the journal Indoor Air.

“History set us up for a poor response to the pandemic,” said Jimenez, fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and distinguished professor of chemistry at CU Boulder. “We might have had millions of fewer deaths, hundreds of millions fewer cases, if we’d taken appropriate, effective action from the start.”

The overview, written with colleagues from 10 countries, illuminates the often deadly impact of “belief perseverance,” in which it can take years or decades to challenge a set of beliefs—especially when the consequence of changing a set of beliefs is costly. It’s less expensive to ask people to wash hands or disinfect surfaces than it is to update a ventilation system, for example, or to re-engineer school classrooms, city buses and corporate boardrooms.

The authors, who include physicians, virologists, public health specialists, aerosol scientists, engineers, historians, a sociologist and an architect, spin through numerous examples of fatal mistakes in the history of research on infectious diseases. In 1847, for example, a scientist working in Austria showed that handwashing by medical doctors reduced deadly puerperal fever in a clinic. His work was dismissed because at the time, established medical and scientific beliefs blamed “a miasma in the air.” Handwashing made no sense to the establishment, and the suggestion that physicians, themselves, might be spreading disease, offended many.

Half a century later, another prominent researcher, Charles Chapin, ridiculed the idea of spooky miasmas or infected air. Chapin’s own work on infection had suggested to him that “contact infection” was the predominant way most infections spread. But he also knew how difficult it was to persuade people to wash their hands and disinfect surfaces if they thought some diseases might spread through the air, and how difficult it would be to figure out how to clean the air itself. So he argued his “contact infection” theory without evidence and managed to effectively label airborne disease transmission as superstition.

Jimenez and his co-authors trace disease transmission history from Chapin to 2020, when the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other institutions expressed deep skepticism or outright denial that SARS-CoV-2 might spread through the air, despite increasing evidence it was doing just that.

Jimenez said he thinks that most people at WHO and CDC were honest in their skepticism in early 2020, just struggling to get their minds around the fact that the conventional way of thinking about respiratory infection transmission—spreading through heavy droplets falling on surfaces—might be inadequate to explain the pandemic.

“They were stuck on the theory, distorting the interpretation of the observations to match their pre-existing beliefs,” said Jimenez.

Others have suggested that economics have also been at play, much as with climate change.

It’s convenient to ask individuals to take small, individual actions like handwashing and driving less, Jimenez noted. It’s more expensive for institutions to make structural changes, such as increasing ventilation everywhere, or replacing fossil fuel infrastructure with renewable energy.

So in preparation for facing the next pandemic intelligently, Jimenez and his colleagues are first working to find allies, especially in the hardworking medical and public health professions where many people have been too busy saving lives to enter the discussion about disease transmission, but have direct experience.

“And confrontation is also needed when major institutions refuse to accept the science and to communicate it clearly,” Jimenez added. “Maybe we have to badger the establishment a little, like Florence Nightingale did.”

Nightingale “lobbied” the British government for decades to support her reforms at hospitals, increasing hygiene, ventilation and distance between beds at a time when it was still seen as unnecessary.

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JOURNAL

Indoor Air

DOI

10.1111/ina.13070 

ARTICLE TITLE

What were the historical reasons for the resistance to recognizing airborne transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic? 

Cannabis legalization decreases the stock market value of major pharmaceutical firms

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO

 

IMAGE: RESEARCHERS FIND CANNABIS LEGALIZATION WILL REDUCE CONVENTIONAL PHARMACEUTICAL SALES BY BILLIONS OF DOLLARS. view more 

CREDIT: UNM STOCK IMAGE

Researchers from California Polytechnic State University and The University of New Mexico find that stock market investors predict cannabis legalization will reduce conventional pharmaceutical sales by billions of dollars.

In their recent study, “U.S. Cannabis Laws Projected to Cost Generic and Brand Pharmaceutical Firms Billions,” published in PLOS One, Ziemowit Bednarek from the Finance department at California Polytechnic State University, Sarah Stith from the University of New Mexico’s Economics department, and a co-author studied how the stock market returns of publicly traded pharmaceutical firms responded to medical and recreational cannabis legalization events. They found that stock market returns were 1.5-2% lower at 10 days following a cannabis legalization event and that the implications of the annual sale from this reduction were in the billions.

Other studies have determined that cannabis access reduces the consumption of specific types of medications, such as opioids, or in certain patient populations like Medicaid patients, but this is the first study to analyze the overall effect of cannabis on pharmaceutical firms across all products and types of patients. Unlike other drugs, which are designed to target and are approved for specific conditions, cannabis is used to treat an astonishing range of conditions including physical symptoms such as headaches and muscle spasms as well as mental conditions such as depression and anxiety.

The cost of pharmaceutical drugs remains a major barrier to healthcare for many Americans and a significant financial burden to state and federal governments – cannabis may be part of the solution. The current study concludes that cannabis acts as a new competitor in drug markets. Extrapolating the results to full federal legalization, the authors estimate a reduction in conventional pharmaceutical sales of almost 11%. Substitution away from conventional drugs towards cannabis appears to be occurring even without standardization, clear dosing instructions, or health insurance coverage.

Co-author Sarah Stith continues, “Currently, cannabis patients and their providers have little information to guide them towards the most effective treatment for their condition. The future of cannabis medicine lies in understanding the prevalence and effects of the plants’ components beyond THC and CBD and identifying ways to categorize cannabis by measurable characteristics that are known to yield specific effects. Mimicking conventional pharmaceuticals through standardization may not be the optimal endpoint for cannabis, as the variability inherent in the cannabis plant is likely driving its ability to treat so many conditions.”

In addition to their overall findings that cannabis legalization decreases the stock market value of publicly traded pharmaceutical firms, the authors found that recreational legalization had more than twice the impact of medical legalization, presumably because of the much larger affected population as medical cannabis access is typically restricted to those with severe, debilitating conditions. Branded drug manufacturers were more affected than generic manufacturers, perhaps due to a greater competitive impact from cannabis entry on drugs without any existing competitors.

The study concludes that conventional pharmaceutical manufacturers may benefit from investing in cannabis markets rather than lobbying against them and that regulatory policy should facilitate further research into the risks and benefits of using cannabis for both medical and recreational reasons. The magnitude of the negative effect of cannabis legalization on the stock market returns from investing in conventional pharmaceutical firms suggests that cannabis is likely to be a permanent and growing player in pharmaceutical markets worldwide.

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

U.S. Cannabis Laws Projected to Cost Generic and Brand Pharmaceutical Firms Billions

Artificial intelligence can be used to better monitor Maine’s forests, UMaine study finds

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF MAINE

 

IMAGE: UMAINE RESEARCHERS TESTING WIRELESS SENSORS USED TO COLLECT FOREST DATA. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MAINE

Monitoring and measuring forest ecosystems is a complex challenge because of an existing combination of softwares, collection systems and computing environments that require increasing amounts of energy to power. The University of Maine’s Wireless Sensor Networks (WiSe-Net) laboratory has developed a novel method of using artificial intelligence and machine learning to make monitoring soil moisture more energy and cost efficient — one that could be used to make measuring more efficient across the broad forest ecosystems of Maine and beyond.

Soil moisture is an important variable in forested and agricultural ecosystems alike, particularly under the recent drought conditions of past Maine summers. Despite the robust soil moisture monitoring networks and large, freely available databases, the cost of commercial soil moisture sensors and the power that they use to run can be prohibitive for researchers, foresters, farmers and others tracking the health of the land.

Along with researchers at the University of New Hampshire and University of Vermont, UMaine’s WiSe-Net designed a wireless sensor network that uses artificial intelligence to learn how to be more power efficient in monitoring soil moisture and processing the data. The research was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. 

“AI can learn from the environment, predict the wireless link quality and incoming solar energy to efficiently use limited energy and make a robust low cost network run longer and more reliably,” says Ali Abedi, principal investigator of the recent study and professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Maine.

The software learns over time how to make the best use of available network resources, which helps produce power efficient systems at a lower cost for large scale monitoring compared to the existing industry standards.

WiSe-Net also collaborated with Aaron Weiskittel, director of the Center for Research on Sustainable Forests, to ensure that all hardware and software research is informed by the science and tailored to the research needs. 

“Soil moisture is a primary driver of tree growth, but it changes rapidly, both daily as well as seasonally,” Weiskittel says. “We have lacked the ability to monitor effectively at scale. Historically, we used expensive sensors that collected at fixed intervals — every minute, for example — but were not very reliable. A cheaper and more robust sensor with wireless capabilities like this really opens the door for future applications for researchers and practitioners alike.”

The study was published Aug. 9, 2022, in the Springer’s International Journal of Wireless Information Networks.

Although the system designed by the researchers focuses on soil moisture, the same methodology could be extended to other types of sensors, like ambient temperature, snow depth and more, as well as scaling up the networks with more sensor nodes.

“Real-time monitoring of different variables requires different sampling rates and power levels. An AI agent can learn these and adjust the data collection and transmission frequency accordingly rather than sampling and sending every single data point, which is not as efficient,” Abedi says. 

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JOURNAL

International Journal of Wireless Information Networks

DOI

10.1007/s10776-022-00572-9 

ARTICLE TITLE

Sharing wireless spectrum in the forest ecosystems using artificial intelligence and machine learning

Fast charging over 10,000 cycles: For future electric vehicles, Harvard engineers’ solid-state battery technology points to a leap in performance and reliability

Startup Adden Energy granted technology license from Harvard to scale innovative lithium-metal battery technology for commercial deployment

Business Announcement

HARVARD JOHN A. PAULSON SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCES

Harvard’s Office of Technology Development has granted an exclusive technology license to Adden Energy, Inc., a startup developing innovative solid-state battery systems for use in future electric vehicles (EVs) that would fully charge in minutes. Adden Energy has closed a seed round with $5.15M in funding led by Primavera Capital Group, with participation by Rhapsody Venture Partners and MassVentures.

The license and the venture funding will enable the startup to scale Harvard’s laboratory prototype toward commercial deployment of a solid-state lithium-metal battery that may provide reliable and fast charging for future EVs to help bring them into the mass market. 

Developed by researchers in the lab of Xin Li, PhD, Associate Professor of Materials Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), the lab-scale coin-cell prototype has achieved battery charge rates as fast as three minutes with over 10,000 cycles in a lifetime, with results published in Nature and other journals. It also boasts high energy density and a level of material stability that overcomes the safety challenges posed by some other lithium batteries. 

Adden Energy was co-founded in 2021 by Li, along with William Fitzhugh, PhD ’20, and Luhan Ye, PhD ’22, both of whom contributed to the development of the technology as graduate students in Li’s Harvard lab. Fred Hu, PhD ’93, founder and Chairman of Primavera Capital, is also a founder of Adden Energy.

The startup aims to scale the battery up to a palm-sized pouch cell, and then upward toward a full-scale vehicle battery in the next three to five years. “If you want to electrify vehicles, a solid-state battery is the way to go,” said Li, who is a scientific advisor to Adden Energy. “We set out to commercialize this technology because we do see our technology as unique compared to other solid-state batteries. We have achieved in the lab 5,000 to 10,000 charge cycles in a battery’s lifetime, compared with 2,000 to 3,000 charging cycles for even the best in class now, and we don’t see any fundamental limit to scaling up our battery technology. That could be a game changer.”

Fitzhugh, CEO of Adden Energy, noted that in 2019, 29% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions were produced by transportation. “Complete electrification of the vehicle fleet is one of the most meaningful steps we can take to fight climate change,” he said. “However, broad adoption of electric vehicles requires batteries that can meet a diverse set of consumer needs. For example, 37% of Americans don’t have garages at home, so at-home overnight charging is not possible. In order to electrify this segment, EVs need to recharge at comparable times to internal combustion vehicles, essentially in the time you’d currently spend at the gas pump.”

The technology developed at Harvard, which includes core innovations in solid-state battery design and electrolyte production methods, may offer other crucial advantages.

“Typically, lithium-metal anodes in other solid-state designs develop dendrites, twig-like growths that can gradually penetrate through the electrolyte to the cathode. We defeat the growth of dendrites before they can cause damage, by novel structural and material designs,” said Ye, who is now CTO of Adden Energy. “As a result, the device can sustain its high performance over a long lifetime. Our recent study shows that this nice feature can also be maintained at scale-up.” 

“Climate change is the defining challenge facing the world. It is more important than ever to accelerate the transition to clean energy and zero-emission transportation,” said Hu, who also serves on the Global Board of the Nature Conservancy. “Adden Energy’s mission is to develop cutting-edge battery technologies, thereby enabling mass adoption of electric vehicles and contributing to a greener and more sustainable global economy.” 

“Electric vehicles cannot remain a luxury fashion, literally the ‘one percent’ of vehicles on the road, if we are to make progress toward a clean energy future, and the U.S. won’t have a used-car market if EV batteries last only 3 to 5 years,” added Li. “The technology needs to be accessible to everyone. Extending the lifetime of the batteries, as we’re doing here, is an important part of that.” 

The solid state battery research advances in Li’s Harvard lab that have been licensed to Adden Energy were enabled in part by funding from the University’s Climate Change Solutions Fund, which supports research and policy initiatives addressing climate change, the transition to clean energy, and related health impacts; and from Harvard OTD’s Physical Sciences and Engineering Accelerator, which advances researchers’ most commercially promising innovations toward the launch of new startups and industry engagements. Li’s lab has also received funding in support of solid-state battery research from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) Catalyst Program, the Harvard Data Science Initiative, the Harvard FAS Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship, and the U.S. Department of Energy.

About Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development

Harvard’s Office of Technology Development (OTD) promotes the public good by fostering innovation and translating new inventions made at Harvard University into useful products that are available and beneficial to society. Our integrated approach to technology development comprises sponsored research and corporate alliances, intellectual property management, and technology commercialization through venture creation and licensing. More than 100 startups have launched to commercialize Harvard technologies in the past 5 years, collectively raising more than $4.4 billion in financing. To further bridge the academic-industry development gap, Harvard OTD manages the Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator and the Physical Sciences & Engineering Accelerator. For more information, please visit https://otd.harvard.edu. 

Teenagers more likely to vape if their parents smoke

Reports and Proceedings

EUROPEAN LUNG FOUNDATION

Teenagers whose parents are smokers are 55% more likely to try e-cigarettes, according to research presented at the European Respiratory Society International Congress in Barcelona, Spain [1]. In a large study of Irish teenagers, the researchers have also found that the proportion who have tried e-cigarettes has been increasing dramatically [2] and that although boys are more likely to use e-cigarettes, the rate of use among girls in increasing more rapidly [3].

 

The researchers highlight the risks associated with nicotine addiction and call for more effective regulation to protect children and teenagers.

 

The research was carried out by a team at the TobaccoFree Research Institute Ireland (TFRI), in Dublin. They examined data on 6,216 17-18-year-olds, including information on whether their parents smoked while they were growing up. The teenagers were asked whether they smoked or used e-cigarettes.

 

The study showed that teenagers whose parents smoked were around 55% more likely to have tried e-cigarettes and around 51% more likely to have tried smoking.

 

The team also combined several Irish data sets to provide the most comprehensive analyses of teenage e-cigarette use in Ireland, with information on more than 10,000 Irish teenagers (aged 16 to 17), to look at the overall numbers of teenagers trying or regularly using e-cigarettes and how this is changing over time. This showed that the proportion who had tried e-cigarettes had increased from 23% in 2014 to 39% in 2019.

 

The main reasons teenagers gave for trying e-cigarettes were curiosity (66%) and because their friends were vaping (29%). Only 3% said it was to quit smoking. The proportion who said they had never used tobacco when they first tried e-cigarettes increased from 32% in 2015 to 68% in 2019.

 

TFRI Director General Professor Luke Clancy explained: “We have found increasing use of e-cigarettes in Irish teenagers and that’s a pattern that is emerging elsewhere in the world. There’s a perception that vaping is a better alternative to smoking, but our research shows that this doesn’t apply to teenagers who usually haven’t tried cigarettes prior to e-cigarettes. This indicates that, for teens, vaping is a route into nicotine addiction, rather than out of it.”

 

Finally, the researchers looked in detail at data on 3,421 16-year-olds to see if there were differences between boys and girls. Although boys were more likely to try or use e-cigarettes, the researchers found that rates were increasing more quickly among girls with 23% saying they had tried e-cigarettes in 2015 and 39% in 2019, and 10% saying they were currently using e-cigarettes in 2015, rising to 18% in 2019. Researchers found that having friends who smoke and having less parental monitoring were both major factors in teenage use of e-cigarettes, more so for boys than girls.

 

Doctoral researcher Ms Salome Sunday told the Congress: “We can see that parents and friends have an influence on teenagers’ decisions to try e-cigarettes and that’s important because these are factors that we can try to change. However, governments need to play their part by making laws to protect children and young people. We already do this with smoking and we need to do the same with vaping.”

 

Lead Researcher Dr Joan Hanafin added: “We can see that the number of teenagers using e-cigarettes is changing fast, so we need to keep monitoring the situation in Ireland and around the world. We also plan to study social media to understand how this influences girls’ and boys’ vaping behaviour.”

 

Professor Jonathan Grigg is Chair of the European Respiratory Society’s Tobacco Control Committee and was not involved in the research. He says: “These findings are worrying, not just for teenagers in Ireland, but for families all around the world. We know already that children of parents who smoke are more likely to take up smoking. This study suggests that teenagers are also influenced by smoking parents to start using e-cigarettes and become addicted to nicotine.

 

“This work indicates that more and more teenagers are trying e-cigarettes and they are not doing so to help them quit smoking. This is important because we know that e-cigarettes are not harmless. The effects of nicotine addiction are well-established, and we are discovering that e-cigarettes can harm the lungs, blood vessels and brain. We need to do more to protect children and teenagers from these harms.”

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METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People