#308: While The Doctors Leave, The Robots Clock In
The one-minute weekly healthtech roundup, by SomX
Hello healthtech homies.
We’ve been pretty UK NHS heavy for the past few weeks, so I’m bringing you a more global flavour to this week’s news with stories from the US, Australia and Europe.
Plenty happening with new devices - exoskeletons, thermal cameras, robots - the cool side of healthtech.
And of course, the usual big AI company-tries-to-dominate-eveything story, but hey, on the way to ruling us all and the inevitable dystopia, it looks like they’ll solve a few healthcare problems along the way.
Enjoy.
James.
News Bites 🥪
🎗️🇺🇸 OpenAI makes moves to cure hepatitis and fix oncology trials: OpenAI’s making serious healthcare moves. Their foundation’s committed $100m to ‘at least double’ hepatitis C cure rates across 8 US jurisdictions. Although hepatitis C already has a cure (8-12 weeks of antivirals, over 95% effective) 2/3 of those infected in the US never get treated and there are 40 deaths per day, which is pretty shocking. Meanwhile Massive Bio‘s been named an OpenAI Select Partner for turning oncology trial eligibility criteria into something machine-readable, which is one of those problems you can’t believe is a problem in 2026. It’s starting to become pretty clear as I write this every week… these AI behemoths want to tackle healthcare. Badly. And they’re throwing a lot at it.
🔬🇦🇺 New AI spots the bowel cancers that’ll come back: With stage-two bowel cancer, most patients are cured by surgery, but some relapse and we don’t currently have a reliable way of knowing who that’ll be. This tool looks at the edge of the tumour, where it pushes into surrounding tissue, and predicts relapse. We’ve known that’s a thing, but the human eye is subjective and inconsistent, so a great example of the technology giving us a stepwise improvement. Built on 1,600-plus slides and validated across 1,220 patients in three independent cohorts, it sounds pretty rigorous. And the cherry on top is that it runs on routine digital pathology, so no new tests, no fresh tissue, no “oh just do this really quick extra 10 step thing.” Ideal.
🦄🇺🇸 Five healthtechs on Forbes’ unicorns-in-waiting list: Forbes and TrueBridge do this every year, and their hit rate’s pretty good - 60% of the 275 alumni went on to become actual unicorns. So here we go… a quarter of this year’s twenty are health. Ossium Health runs the world’s first bone marrow bank in Indiana, freezing marrow from deceased donors so blood cancer patients can be transplanted on demand. Abby Care trains families to become paid caregivers using Medicaid money for care they were already giving for free. Valthos, backed by OpenAI and selling to the US Department of Defense, builds AI models to characterise pathogens before they become the pandemic. Fortell Research makes an AI hearing aid. And Lotus Health offers free 24/7 virtual primary care in 50+ languages.
🦶🇦🇺 Thermal camera reads wounds’ heat signatures: Diabetic foot ulcers are a devastating complication and they end in infection, amputation and early death. Up to a third of people with diabetes will get one and they’re tricky to assess and treat to say the least. THERMUL, out of the University of Melbourne and RMIT, points a smartphone thermal camera at the wound and predicts 12 week healing from a heat pattern in <60s. It’s been trained on 110 patients so far, which, ok, is no RCT but with 400 more patients and a submission with TGA (their regulator) to come, it looks promising. Ticks many boxes for rural adoption and has implications for global health too.. cheap ✅ portable ✅ and easy to adopt and use ✅. One to watch.
🦾🇦🇺 A robot that scans your veins so a sonographer doesn’t have to: Another Aussie story… Vexev has raised $6m (taking it to $19m) for VxWave, which uses robotics and AI to automate upper-limb vascular imaging, starting with dialysis access. I worked on a dialysis unit for a while and this is a very sensible starting point, given those patients need their fistulas checked constantly and the workflow is repetitive enough.
🦿🇫🇷 The exoskeleton finally leaves the rehab gym: This is awesome. Wandercraft (a Parisian-founded robotics company) has achieved FDA clearance for Eve, which is a self-balancing personal exoskeleton for adults with spinal cord injuries. On their website, they say the device is for at home, and poignant was a list of benefits that I’m sure most of us reading take for granted every single day… “have a conversation face-to-face, bake a cake, brush your teeth, interact with loved ones while standing upright.” They’ve had a clinic-version of the device active for some time but this is a true at-home device to augment wheelchair use.
🦠🇺🇸 Contact tracing, but for the ward you’re already on: I’m always switched on for this type of company. Living through a pandemic whilst working in healthtech and seeing how we’ve gone about things since has always given me this feeling of unease. I feel like we quickly forget and maybe it’s all behind the scenes, but I’m not aware of any big plans for the next one. The likelihood of another global pandemic is 100%. In our lifetime, ok, maybe a bit less, but thankfully, Claryx has come out of stealth with $3.5m pre-seed for CloneLink, which sequences pathogen genomes from confirmed infections and works out whether cases sit in the same transmission chain. Cleverer still, it compares those against a genomic map of a hospital, built from air, water and surface samples. Multiple health systems are apparently already using it (phew) and knowing where a bug actually came from beats “deep clean and fingers crossed.”
🩺🇬🇧 31% of UK doctors are planning to leave medicine, new report finds:
State of Medical Education & Doctors in the UK 2026 report surveyed medical students and doctors across six career stages, and the numbers are predictably grim… 31% are actively planning to leave UK medicine or switch specialty, with another 54% considering it. Worse, 78% of foundation doctors don’t feel confident entering clinical practice, and 61% don’t feel prepared for the realities of the job. Nice.
And finally…
🧘 Seven days of meditation will apparently rewire your brain: If you needed an excuse to chill the f*** out, 20 healthy adults went on a week-long retreat, did 33 hours of guided meditation, and came back with altered fMRI connectivity, raised endogenous opioids, and plasma that made lab-grown neurons sprout longer branches after it had been removed from their bodies. The UC San Diego team reckon the brain patterns look a bit like psilocybin, minus the psilocybin. But always check the method, folks… no control group, no clinical population, and the retreat was run by the co-author who’s employed by the company selling the retreat (which is disclosed to be fair). BUT, come on now… if plasma from a meditating person makes neurons in a dish start growing, someone should probably find out why. Plasma marketplace startup, anyone?
This week’s Pigeon Insider (the upgrade to this glorious newsletter) is a huge deep dive on the Federated Data Platform. I hardly knew what it was before researching this and I had Tom Bartlett who helped build it on a podcast to ask him all about it.
I go over the technology, the controversies, the ethics and of course, Palantir.
Enjoy 👇🏼
What to listen to 🔊
Great episode on AI and patient consent, which, let’s be honest, is the greyest of areas currently. When does a patient need telling that AI is involved in their care, given there's still no case law or formal NHS guidance on it?
Yale AI ethicist Jess Morley, formerly of the UK Department of Health and Social Care, makes the case for "sceptical optimism" on health AI, reframes ambient scribes as inference engines rather than transcription tools, and argues LLMs should be regulated as medical devices. Great series by Tjasa here.
Events 📅
Get ready for this one. Yes, that’s exactly who you think it is…
SomX Healthtech Talks: Will the NHS waste the AI moment?
🗓️ 2 September
🇬🇧 Hale House, London.
We’re back. And this time, we’re bringing the Rt Hon Sir Jeremy Hunt who served as Chancellor, Foreign Secretary and Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. He’s joined by myself (Dr James Somauroo), Tara Donnelly, one of the NHS’s most respected digital leaders and former Chief Digital Officer at NHS England, and Jack Needham, cofounder of Sanctuary Health, bringing AI to the NHS. I want to get to the nub of where AI can tangibly make a difference in secondary care, where it’ll disappoint, and what it’ll actually take behind the scenes for the health service to truly seize the day. Expect Chatham House Rule, real opinions and stories never heard.
HealthVC Summit 2026
🗓️ 2-3 September
🇨🇭 Zurich.
Two days connecting health investors and founders across Europe, China and Saudi Arabia. If you’re raising, this is where the cheque-writers gather.
Mental Health Innovation Showcase, Hale House
📅 15 September
📍 🇬🇧 Hale House, London.
MHIN’s showcase returns to the Harley Street Health District for a full day (noon to 9pm, so pace yourself) of mental health innovation. Given how much of this space still runs on vibes rather than evidence, worth your time.
Life Sciences Week 2026
🗓️ 21-25 September
🇬🇧 Birmingham.
Britain’s national life sciences week, pulling biotech, medtech, pharma, academia and investors into one place. A proper cross-sector convening rather than the usual echo chamber.
LSI Europe ‘26 Emerging Medtech Summit
🗓️ 28 September-1 October
🇪🇸 Grand Hyatt Barcelona.
Europe’s leading emerging-medtech investor summit, matching founders with VCs, PE and strategics. Sunny, well-connected, and squarely aimed at getting deals done.
TechBio UK 2026
📅 13 October
📍 🇬🇧 Kings Place, London.
The BIA’s flagship TechBio conference, uniting biotech, pharma, tech and investment leaders.
Harley Street Health District Conference 2026
📅 20 October
📍 🇬🇧 1 Wimpole Street, London.
A full-day conference from the district becoming one of London’s biggest healthtech hubs.
Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.
Opportunities 💰
🩺 Clinical Associate in Sales & Success, Heidi Health (London): A role built for early-career or recently-practising clinicians who fancy a move into healthtech without leaving clinical judgement at the door. Heidi’s ambient scribe is already powering millions of patient visits a week, so you’d be joining at proper scale, not a two-person pilot.
🩺 Various roles at Neko Health: Daniel Ek's preventive scanning outfit closed a $700m Series C in July at a reported $7bn valuation, and the board is now roughly 90 roles deep. Clinical roles like GPs, nurses, healthcare assistants, echocardiographers, biomedical scientists across London, Manchester and Birmingham, alongside a US build-out in New York and Miami. Plenty for non-clinical too… EMEA regulatory affairs (UK Responsible Person, MHRA relationship, the lot) and a stack of engineering roles out of Stockholm.
🏥 Chief Digital Information Officer, Barking Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust: One of the bigger digital jobs going in the NHS right now. BHRUT serves over a million people across North East London with 8,400 staff, and they've just put in a new EPR, which means the hard part (making it actually useful) is still ahead. You'd sit on the Executive Team reporting straight to the CEO, owning digital, data and AI strategy, cyber resilience and the platform estate. VSM band, permanent, Romford-based across sites. Closes 23 August.
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Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.