#175 - When the beat drops...🎶

The one-minute healthtech roundup

Jan 07, 2024

Hi friends,

This week: Cynical predictions, swallowable sponges diagnose cancer, and can we treat dementia using playlists?

News Bites 🥪

❤️‍🩹 Norway's CardioMech raises $13M in funding for its transcatheter mitral chordal repair technology – Before you ask, mitral regurgitation is when there’s backward flow of blood across the mitral valve. It’s potentially deadly, quite common, and Cardiomedich have added a bucket of new funding to bring its tech to the world.

🎧 Warner & UK HealthTech trial ‘music as medicine’ – In more stressful moments, Pigeon often goes searching for some chilled lo-fi beats to take the edge off, but we’d never considered them to be clinically therapeutic…until now. A partnership between Warner Music Group and MediMusic is offering a music ‘drip’ to help ease anxiety in dementia sufferers through tailored playlists.

❌ Overhyped? Digital Health Executive Anti-Predictions For Healthcare In 2024 – Pigeon found any number of far flung prediction articles for what might happen in healthtech in 2024. Most were quite interesting. Some were just gibberish. Being honest, this one – which takes a more cynical look at what won’t change and what’s being overhyped – is more up our street.

🧽 West Yorkshire: How new tech is helping Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust detect cancer sooner – High-tech sponges? AI algorithms? Robot arms? For all the doom and gloom in healthtech, it’s easy to forget that potentially transformative technology is already in regular use in some areas of the NHS. Now we just need to work out how to scale the bits that work.

💰 LumiraDx to sell point of care technology platform to Roche for $295M – The first acquisition announcement of 2024 and it’s a big one: In what might be described as something of an emergency exit (NASDAQ informed the company they could be delisted), the diagnostics technology company is set to become a part of the pharma giant’s diagnostics platform.

📈 Wearable technology trend now includes healthy people tracking their blood glucose. Is it worth it? – What metrics are you tracking? What do you do with the data? Does it actually matter? These are all questions we should be asking ourselves as we throw our cash at wearable technology with the hope that it’ll help us be healthier – because the truth is, it might not.

🎭 Why healthcare organizations have a role to play in promoting health literacy and shared decision-making – We’ve known for a while that patients that take a more significant role in their own health tend to have better outcomes. But poor health literacy gets in the way, and providers have a role to play in closing that gap.

🤑 Goldman Sachs Asset Management raises $650 mln for life sciences fund – If you were thinking that investors had checked out of healthcare, Goldman Sachs are here to disabuse you of that notion. With $650m on the table, and a focus on early to midstage startups, Goldman clearly believes there’s life left in the sector yet.

Apply for funding 🙏

If you regularly find your organisation is having useful chinwags about regulatory science, why not turn those conversations into something valuable. Innovate UK has put £7.5m on the table for collaborations to develop virtual networks of expertise producing new datasets and tools to promote innovation. Apply now.

What to listen to 🔊

🐦 The Healthtech Pigeon Podc ast - When the Beat Drops… — Join James, Jessica and Huw as they take a deep dive into the week’s healthtech news and views.

Like a podcast, but IRL… 🎤

Join us for a very special moment. After 300+ episodes, the Healthtech Podcast comes to BFI Southbank on 29th February for its first ever public live recording. Book your ticket now and don’t miss the conversation. Use code ‘COOCOO40’ for a special pigeon discount.

Events 📅

London Biotechnology Show
🕣 20 February
📍 Olympia West, London

HETT North
🕣 28 February - Free to attend!
📍 Manchester

HealthTechX Summit 2024
🕣 28 February - Use HTX24SMITH for 30% off your ticket
📍 The Hurlingham Club, London

Life Sciences Access Academy Annual NHS Conference
🕣 16 April
📍 The Kings Fund, Cavendish Square, London

LSX World Congress
🕣 29 April
📍 Business Design Centre, London

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🎬 Associate Strategy Director, Novo Nordisk – Want to help one of the world’s largest healthcare companies to implement a new strategic direction and deliver better outcomes for patients? Get your project management hat on and hit apply.

📤 Business Development Manager, Accurx – Pioneers in patient communication, Accurx is one of the best known healthtech scaleups, and are continuing to grow their presence in primary and secondary care. If you’re a BD whiz, there will be few better places to work your magic.

✍️ Senior Editor, the Lancet Digital Health – Own the editorial direction for one of the most revered publications in digital health. If you’re an MD or PhD with editorial skills and an interest in digital health, this is the role for you.

🎓 Professor of AI in Biomedicine and Healthcare, Digital Environment Research Institute (DERI) - Here’s a special role for an experienced, pioneering academic with a passion for the role of AI in healthcare and the ability to drive forward research into its use. If this sounds like you, apply now.

📲 Head of Product - Health Feedback and Recontact Studies, Our Future Health – the project to map, understand and develop new approaches to population health continues, and is seeking a product leader to take it to another level.

Got news, jobs or events you think is worth coo-ing over? Let us know! Email us: news@healthtechpigeon.com

SomX is a communications and creative agency for healthcare. We are clinicians, scientists, creatives and communicators dedicated to serving our healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector clients with services across strategy, content, PR, design, events and media production. Get in touch to learn more.