#273: AI-ming high

The one-minute healthtech roundup, brought to you by SomX

Hello healthtechies,

This week: Forbes give us the latest ‘pipeline to prison’ (30U30) list, a founder shuts down their own mental health app because it was too dangerous, and there’s a 100% chance you’ll die… in a pandemic… if you live long enough. What a fun week.

Is that the statue of Jebediah Springfield?*

🎙️ Fancy this newsletter in podcast form, with some juicy gossip to impress your friends? 👇 Well… click this linky link to go straight to the pod on Spotify.

And it’s on YouTube if you’re young and cool, or old and like watching humans interact.

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News Bites 🥪

💡 Forbes 30 Under 30: The AI Innovators Fixing Healthcare Admin Let’s be honest, F30U30 alumni haven’t had a great track record in recent years for, well, staying out of jail (Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, Carline Ellison & Martin Shkreli collectively and affectionately got it renamed The Pipeline to Prison), but Forbes have ploughed on and released the 2026 FBI watchlist AI innovator list. The link above is a specific list for “Using AI To Improve Care And Cut Administrative Burdens” which seems niche in the grand scheme, but the 30U30 business model has, at least, become more clear.**

🧬 Will-we-be Diagnosing Perimenopause? Willbe Think So… Firstly, what a headline (thanks, Grace). Secondly, women’s health firm, Willbe, have launched a commercial genetic test - FemGene - that analyses DNA aiming to predict how a woman’s body will metabolise and respond to declining hormones, long before perimenopause symptoms take hold. Founder, and biomedical scientist, Yulia Mintchin describes perimenopause as an ‘epigenetic reprogramming event’ and by predicting the hormonal journey, they hope to ‘deliver targeted solutions from day 1.’

🤝 Wellcoming a Grant for Digital Mental Health Regulation: The Wellcome Trust have sent a cool £2 million over to the MHRA and NICE with the aim of establishing better regulatory standards for digital mental health technology in the UK. What will this cover? Anything from new apps, tools, chatbots and platforms to meet high clinical and safety benchmarks. It’s also a welcome (pun intended) step towards ring fencing the Wild West of AI regulation (we know, we know, we’ve been saying this at Pigeon for weeks now), and also feeds in to our next news story…

⚠️ Experts Warn of ‘ChatGPT Psychosis’: This isn’t going away. We keep seeing these stories and we have to keep putting them in to educate this community on the dangers… Harrowing cases of AI chatbots inspiring delusional behaviour with awful consequences (trigger warning if you click through to read) have been prompting urgent calls for stronger mental health safeguards. The creator of an AI therapy app even shut it down, saying they’re too dangerous for sensitive mental health applications. We’re in a pickle here. We need to scale mental health services through tech. We can’t afford to not do this. But we also can’t afford to get it wrong.

Timely… James spoke to Ross Harper, founder of Limbic, on The Healthtech Podcast to talk about MH treatment with AI. TLDR: the attention to detail required to get it right, means we’re not surprised that there’s a massive majority that get it very wrong. For the specifics of every step of how to build a regulated, safe, mental health AI product, listen to this 2-parter. The video is a trailer 👇

📜 More AI, More Problems: AHA & the FDA Are Joining Forces On Safeguards: On another regulatory note, the American Hospital Association have urged the FDA to develop formal evaluation standards for AI-enabled medical tools. Let’s hope they plan to keep pace with the rate of deployment. If anyone else has read “Careless People” by Sarah Wynn-Williams, you’ll probably have the same level of concerns that Pigeon does re: big AI tech doing big things, fast.

🔬 Metri Bio raises $5m for endometrial therapeutics: Boston-based biotech company Metri Bio have raised $5 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate the discovery and development of a novel (and much-needed) endometriosis therapeutic. What’s very cool is that Metri have created a proprietary 3D endometrial modelling technology to better understand the disease’s molecular drivers - respect to anyone trying to get us to a deeper understanding of complex human biology.

🌏 AI Is Also Now Targeting Outbreaks: An AI platform for disease outbreak intelligence is scheduled for pilot programs in 2026, starting with a launch in Asia. Designed to analyse hordes of data to predict infectious outbreaks (think dengue, cholera, and other things Pigeon really wouldn’t want to catch), the tech will feed the findings into health authority bodies so as to inform their preventative resources being deployed faster. We’re not exactly keen for a COVID-19 sequel, but there’s a 2-3% annual probability of a global pandemic, which means about a 50% chance we get another one in the next 25 years. Having a plan sounds very cool indeed.***

🇳🇴 Noteless, But Not Least: (Is that a funny headline? I don’t even know anymore) Norwegian healthtech scribe platform, Noteless, have entered the chat, with a raise of €3.5 million. With the likes of Heidi, Tortus, Tandem and a huge and growing list of scribe companies fighting for market share, it makes you wonder what will happen. Will the tech will get cheaper and more available to buy and/or build? Will it just become a feature? Will there be a load of M&A activity from the big ones? Is a good strategy to raise small, use your unfair advantages and capture a local market? (Coming soon: Pigeon Post - the AI scribe version****).

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What to Listen to 🔊

Events 📅

GIANT Health
📅 Dec 8 - 9
📍 London

Google x NXGN Xmas Party (subscribe to NXGN here for signup link access!)
📅 Dec 11
📍 London

Then… Happy Holidays! 🎄

Radical Health
📅 Jan 19 - 21
📍 Helsinki, Finland

… and more to follow in 2026!

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Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🗞️ 3 roles at SomX: If you’re into communications / marketing and think you could handle the kind of chat in this newsletter every weekday (except every other Friday, we work a 9-day-fortnight), then apply here (official deadline was 23rd Nov, but if your application is in before Monday 9am, rumour has it, you’ll just sneak in before shortlisting). We help healthtech, biotech and pharma companies with everything you can think of, comms- and marketing-wise, and we’re looking for people across content and PR to help us with some very cool new clients. DM me (James) if you have any questions.

⚙️ Clinical Engineer at Eolas Medical: If you’re a doctor that codes and lives in either Belfast, London or Barcelona, then this will make your day. A potential £110k is on the table if you’re experienced but the main perk is having Declan Kelly as your boss. Check out this podcast with him to get incredibly inspired about the work they’re doing (and swat up for the interview) 👇

⭐️ PRiSMM Digital Health PhD Studentship: A slightly different one from us this week at Pigeon, with a fully-funded PhD studentship that aims to explore digital signatures of health behaviours and predictors of pregnancy outcomes within the national PRiSMM dataset based at KCL. If you’re wanting to crack into the field of AI/ML research at the forefront of big datasets in the UK, look no further.

⭐️ Clinical Specialist, Public Health at Google: The first of two roles at Google featured this week (they’re seemingly on a hiring spree for clinicians - which, is frankly, a big thumbs up from us), with this one focused on public health metrics, impact and improvements from the search engine behemoth. Deadlines soon so check the JD for more deets ^

⭐️ Clinical Specialist, Consumer Health Optimisation at Google: And if consumer health is more your jam, take a look at this snazzy role based in the Google USA offices.

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* Did anyone get this? Just me? (it’s in the caption of the image at the top if you missed it).

** Hi, James here. You may be wondering if I’m bitter that I was never even close to Forbes 30 Under 30 due to having no worthy career achievements in my 20s and if that has affected my editing of Healthtech Pigeon so much that I’m willing to risk libel to add some jokes in. Definitely yes.

*** There were too many examples of government-level calamities to choose from and make a joke out of, here. We love punching up at Pigeon, and rarely miss an opportunity, but to be honest, I actually think this one could be the most important story in this week, and the type of company that we should all collectively support. If we avoid a nuclear war, mega-volcano eruption, alien invasion or other bizarre extinction event, there’s a 100% probability we’ll get another global pandemic and increasing the startup competition in this area for ‘who can make us most prepared’ will benefit us all.

****Not really, but then again, if any readers would consider investing, we might be persuaded.