#237 - Join us in the Fourth Dimension
The one-minute healthtech roundup, brought to you by SomX.
Hi friends,
This week: LLMs gets stuck into medical consultations, positive signs for early stage healthtech investment, and could medical devices adapt and shift as time passes?
Your friends all listen to podcasts. Feel like you’re in on the conversation by listening to the Healthtech Pigeon podcast ➡️ Huw and Jessica from SomX break down the best stories from this week’s newsletter. Available now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
News Bites 🥪
🚀 Alzheimer’s Society unveils new innovation programme to address hospitalisation challenge – One of the most valuable things any healthtech startup can get? Early validation. And that’s what Alzheimer's Society aims to achieve for the first cohort of its Launchpad programme, who will speak to experts and people living with Alzheimer's to test and validate their ideas and technologies.
⏳ Experts enter fourth dimension to create better medical devices - University of Birmingham – Pigeon’s old enough to remember when ‘4D’ meant getting water sprayed at you in a theme park movie theatre. For these experts though, it could be about building technology that adjusts to changes over time – adapting and even growing as the people who use it do.
📲 (£) A California health tech company is letting AI run medical visits, from intake to diagnosis – You’re ill, so you go to your doctor’s office. You meet your “concierge”. They’re not necessarily medically trained, but they have an iPad that is (or at least, using Meta’s LLama LLM – trained on a database of 10 million cases). Could this iPad help clinicians focus on only the most serious cases?
🩻 Brainomix secures €16.7 milllion to advance its AI imaging technology in healthcare – Oxford’s Brainomix are back with their Series C raise, a host of impressive investors, and some standout claims around the benefits delivered by its AI imaging suite. Next stop? US expansion.
💰 Medtech investor THENA Capital raises £27m in first close of new fund – Are we seeing growing investor confidence in early stage healthtech? After Sofinnova Partners indicated an allocation of their $1.2B fund to digital health was upcoming, UK based fund THENA steps up to the plate with their first close.
💸 Bread & Butter Ventures Raises $40M Fund IV with Continued Commitment to Women’s Health Innovation – …and they’re not the only one. With a focus that extends beyond healthtech, Bread & Butter are nonetheless set on bringing value to innovators working in women’s health.
🟰 NHS to study ‘impact on health inequalities’ as digital Health Check pilots to launch imminently – Long anticipated and long delayed, the digital health check (which takes the form of a questionnaire) will roll out imminently to three more trial locations. The team responsible say it will replicate the existing process, but will be watching for any negative impacts.
⌚️ Study: Wearable AI to enhance patient safety and clinical decision-making – Could strengthening AI's role in wearables radically improve the value these tools bring to healthcare? From enhanced glucose and cardiac monitoring insights, to greater use in settings where monitoring capability is limited, a paper published in Nature proposes how wearable AI could benefit both patients, staff and researchers.
🤖 AI framework for NHS launched in London – Pigeon tried using AI. It was rubbish – until we spoke to our support group of tech-obsessed birds, found out what worked and what didn’t, and kept moving forward. We’re glad to see NHS organisations in London taking a leaf out of our book.
🍌 London hospital becomes first in the world to use AI to speed up skin cancer checks – Fresh off the back of their extraordinary regulatory success securing Class III CE marked medical device certification for their DERM app, Skin Analytics is already making a huge impact for patients in London.
What to listen to 🔊
Events 📅
NextMed Health
🕣 March 30 - April 2
📍 San Diego
Co-designing digital health solutions: Shared learnings from clinicians
🕣 March 31
📍 Online
Bio Breakfast London (Bits in Bio x ScienceMachine x future.bio)
🕣 April 2
📍 London
SomX Healthtech Talks @ Google
🕣 April 7
📍 London
LBS Healthcare Conference — Get a 25% discount on your ticket using this link
🕣 April 14 - 15
📍 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 🕵️♀️
✍️ Clinical Editor, BMJ – Editors with an interest in education have until tomorrow (Monday 31st) to apply to join the BMJ team. If you’ve got a medical degree, experience in creating or editing content, or using clinical research in practice, this one’s for you.
✏️ CT Clinical Lead, Compleo Health – Are you a radiographer with Cardiac CT experience and an understanding of governance and compliance? Diagnostic imaging provider Compleo is looking for the right person to help train and support users and ensure compliance with regulatory frameworks.
📈 Clinical Growth Specialist, Invivo Health – Microbiome specialist with sales experience? Invivo have partnered with Microba Life Sciences and are looking for the right candidate to grow the partnership and work with practitioners worldwide.
👉 Co-founder: Chief Medical/Clinical Research Officer (Neurology & Digital Therapeutics), Zenna – DTx spinout Zenna is already past the initial clinical trials stage and looking to advance quickly. Are you the neurologist to help lead the clinical side of their growth phase?
Got news, jobs or events you think is worth coo-ing over? Let us know! Email us: news@healthtechpigeon.com
Healthtech Pigeon is curated and produced by SomX, the 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.