#198 - Insane in the Mini-Brains 🧠

The one-minute healthtech roundup

Jun 16, 2024

Hi friends,

This week: Stop lying to your therapist, building digital babies, and why are we investing so much in healthcare AI?

Tired eyes? 👀 Listen to the Healthtech Pigeon podcast ➡️ Jessica, James and Huw from SomX breakdown the best stories from this week’s newsletter. Available now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

News Bites 🥪

🦀 AI system learns ‘language of cancer’ to enable improved diagnosis – Another banger from the National Cancer Institute, as an AI learned to identify links between specifics in images of patient lungs, before going on to predict patients outcomes and cancer return rates with an accuracy of 72% – higher than the human clinicians. Just don’t ask Duolingo for a refresher course in the language of cancer.

🤥 Lying To Your Therapist Is Being Superseded By Telling The Truth To Generative AI – Startling assertions lie buried throughout this examination of why we’re more likely to tell ChatGPT the truth than we are a real therapist. If you turn to ChatGPT for therapy because you’re afraid a human would be too judgemental, Pigeon’s got really bad news for you…

🧠 UC San Diego develops first-in-kind protocol for creating ‘wired miniature brains’ – Sure, right now it’s all about ‘helping us to understand alzheimers’, but give it a year and it’ll be ‘Oh no, the mini-brains are sentient and they’ve locked us out of the lab…’. Pigeon’s view? Why fight it: all hail the mini-brains.

📲 Study highlights need for more rigorous evaluation of digital health apps – Colour Pigeon shocked, as new report finds that how well reviewed a digital health app is on the app-store doesn’t always match up to how valuable or reliable it is as a healthcare solution. Let’s face it, if a 5-star rating equated to a better health outcome, ChatGPT and TikTok could have solved all the world’s problems by lunchtime tomorrow.

🐣 'Digital babies' created to advance infant precision medicine – Digital twins are all the rage in healthcare, and could help to transform our approach to disease management. But it turns out that we’re all a little bit too unique (metabolically) when we first start out life, so before we can make digital twins of babies, someone needed to actually make a digital baby…

🍟 Urinary incontinence neuromod newcomer Amber Therapeutics nets $100M – Helping women with incontinence to regulate urinary function via electrical stimulation of a hitherto untouched nerve? Amber are addressing an unmet need in a novel way – so much so, they’ve bagged one of the largest raises for a UK medtech company in the process.

📈 AI in Healthcare Report: Healthcare AI investment growing faster than non-health AI – Is AI’s promise in healthcare so much greater than in other sectors? Or do we just like to talk about it more? A new report outlines an interesting trend that’s probably worthy of a longer analysis.

💰 Digital transformation: Health systems' investment priorities – Maybe all those investors throwing money at healthcare AI are counting on the enthusiasm among hospital exec-buyers, many of whom put advanced analytical tools in their list of the top technologies likely to make an impact. That said, if investors are relying on these eager execs, they may be waiting a while for that ROI, if this McKinsey analysis is anything to go by.

🟢 Anterior grabs $20M from NEA to expedite health insurance approvals with AI – Healthcare reimbursement can be a sore subject for healthcare providers, particularly when it requires a significant investment of time and energy to pull together viable claims. Anterior is leveraging AI to solve that problem, and has picked up a sizeable amount from the likes of former-Deepmind, now Microsoft AI guru Mustafa Suleyman, NEA and Sequoia.

💪 First NHS physiotherapy clinic run by AI to start this year – Rapid digitally-enabled progress, or AI-enhanced dystopia? Whatever your feelings about an AI physiotherapist, the future is here. While this article rightly points out that AI is not able to replace a qualified physiotherapist, is it inevitable that we’ll see more exciting partnerships like this, using AI to help close access gaps and reduce backlogs?

What to listen to 🔊

Events 📅

HLTH Europe
🕣 Jun 17-20
📍 Amsterdam

Pathfinder Women’s Health Summit
🕣 Jun 26
📍 Birmingham

HPN South
🕣 Jun 27 -28
📍 Heathrow

SomX Comms 102: Fundraising Essentials
🕣 Jul 11
📍 Online

BIA Summer Party 2024
🕣 Jul 11
📍 London

Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup to see all of the best upcoming healthtech, biotech and healthcare events

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🎬 Programme Director, Digital, Dartford & Gravesham NHS Trust – Expert in digital health and transformation? Experience working with healthcare providers to implement new systems that drive improvements in clinician and patient experience? Live vaguely within reach of junction 30 of the M25. You may be uniquely well suited for this role.

🤖 Research Associate in Foundational Reinforcement Learning for AI Clinician , Imperial College London – There’s a team at Imperial building an ‘AI clinician’, and they’re looking for a machine learning, NLP, data scientist or digital health expert to help them develop the tool as it rolls out in clinical trials. This is probably the coolest job description we’ve put in this newsletter

🧑‍⚕️ Digital health Clinician, Abtrace – If you’re a GP with a passion for digital health, the Abtrace team want to meet you. Run, don’t walk.

🏷️ Sales Director (EMEA), Maven Clinic – One of the companies at the forefront of women’s health, with a incredible track record and a list of impressive backers so long it doesn’t fit in this little caption, wants a sales leader to drive forward their growth in Europe and the Middle East.

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.