From new therapies to targeted medicine, at WIRED Health 2017 we jumped between the main stage, EY Startup Stage and health clinic to find the biggest and best ideas of the year. Here are just some of the things we learned on the day.
Main Stage
Microbiologist and director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Peter Piot, kicked off the main stage talks by addressing what he described as ‘the forgotten epidemic’ of HIV/AIDS. Piot has led key research on HIV/AIDS and reminded the audience of some sobering statistics: two million people are infected with HIV each year, and half of those who contract the disease die from it. While great progress has been made in fighting the disease, he says, it can’t yet be called a success story. To get to that point he says five things need to be done: “First of all it has to be back on the top agenda, by that I mean the political agenda, business agenda; secondly, getting serious about prevention; thirdly, we need money; fourth, we need a vaccine, and lastly we need some innovation and this is where social media and young people come in.” He ended with a clip of MTV’s Shuga, airing in South Africa, where studies have shown that young people who watched the show were less likely to be infected with STDs.
Co-founder and CEO of California-based startup Guardant Health, Helmy Eltoukhy, is using data to conquer cancer by developing a blood test to diagnose the disease. His test could eventually replace tissue biopsies and detect cancer in its early stages. With 26 cancer diagnoses per minute globally, Eltoukhy says he developed the blood test to address the challenge of specificity when treating each stage of cancer. He shared a patient story: Mark, who had been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, was given the Guardant Health blood test, which matched his specific mutation to a therapy that had already proven to be effective. “In three short years [we were able to] go from essentially driving blind to be able to proactively and adaptively manage the disease [in Mark].” Guardant Health has processed more than 40,000 patients. A machine learning backend means the more data that is fed into the system, the better our understanding will be of which therapies are effective on which mutations of cancer.
Chief medical officer for England, Dame Sally Davies gave an overview of a project to sequence the whole genome of 100,000 patients by the government-funded Genomics England. Davies said 25,000 genomes have been sequenced already but with still plenty of work ahead, she said the real challenge is getting people to understand the project’s value. “There is great potential in genomics to improving our outcome as people, as a population, but most importantly as patients,” she told the main stage. “But first of all we have to share our data with researchers so it can be amalgamated and we get the right results for us and the best outcomes.” Davies said the value comes in pinpointing where the faulty genes are, not just the ones people are born with but also the ones that change during a lifetime, like the mutations that cause cancers.
Swiss-based company SOPHiA Genetics is using big data and artificial intelligence alongside DNA sequencing to detect cancer in the lungs, skin, ovaries and breast, as well as congenital diseases. Using machine learning, results are then compared and treatment suggested for patients. Co-founder and CEO Jurgi Camblong told the main stage he is a dreamer who wants to democratise data-driven medicine. He revealed that in the process of doing this, his firm will in a few weeks have analysed the genomic profiles of 100,000 people. SOPHiA's artificial intelligence has already been used to support the diagnosis of 100,000 people. Across 45 countries around the world, in 257 hospitals, 600 experts are using the firm’s technology, which Camblong says is key to democratising medicine. “Collective intelligence requires we connect these people and pool data in a single system. It requires that the experts in the hospital share their expertise about their treatments and additional information they are collecting,” he says. “Then we can move into a world where we can leverage machine intelligence and leverage big data.”
Marko Ahtisaari is on a mission to discover how and why music can be used “as a precision medicine” to improve cognition after a stroke, help those with autism communicate, or aid with the mobility of Parkinson’s patients. To do this he started the Sync Project. “If we can target it appropriately, then we can complement or replace some pharmaceuticals by using sound,” he told the audience. The project has built a platform mapping music characteristics like tempo or beat salience to its biometric effects, and the intent behind the person listening to a piece of music (whether it is for relaxation or exercise). “I believe in ten years from today, we will consider it absurd that we didn’t use these non-drug modalities that have near or drug-like effect as part of how we treat our health, how we live healthier lives,” he said. “It's just that we don’t yet have the data or understanding to implement them and that’s the goal of the Sync Project.”
Khaliya, a philanthropist, Middelthon-Candler Peace Prize winner, and venture capitalist involved with several social ventures promoting innovation in mental health and neurodegenerative disease, spoke on the main stage about the importance of thinking beyond the accepted treatments for mental illness. Coining the term ‘mental injury’ as a new way of thinking about psychological disease, Khaliya said there are blind spots and ineffective solutions in treatment. She claimed illegal drugs like MDMA or LSD have been shown to alleviate the symptoms of mental illness for months at a time after a single, small dose. “I believe the mentally injured should be given access in a clinical setting to anything that helps,” she said. “In suicidal people or addicts for example, it could mean the difference between life and death… What is needed is a for-profit organisation that can help fund this research as well as enable access to these life-saving medications.”
Medical doctor and polar scientist for the European Space Agency, Beth Healey researches health in extreme environments, spending a year and a bit 1,000 miles from the geographic South Pole in Antarctica at a base called Concordia. Her research there will help prepare humans for the physical effects of space travel and interplanetary colonisation, specifically to Mars. But, she said the research they’re doing also has medical applications back on Earth. “Perhaps a nice example is one that we’re doing looking at the effects of artificial lighting on our eyesight during the long polar night,” she said. “While of course that's really relevant to astronauts it's also really relevant to people who are spending a lot of time on night shifts, for example factory workers.”
Associate professor for neurotechnology at Imperial College London, Aldo Faisal ended his talk by showing the main stage audience a person playing the piano with six fingers, one of which was a prosthetic. Faisal’s team is using computational medicine to reverse-engineer the brain, to see how far humans can be pushed or augmented. “Now you can see things that were previously thought unthinkable in robotics and impossible in prosthetics.” He said machine learning applied to data collected by his team while studying the specifics of human movement means robotics can do much more than just replace humans. “Actually, our brain’s capacity for learning adaptation can be really harnessed to push an augmented human body, not just to restore it for those who have lost abilities to move, but to go beyond,” he said.
Startup Stage
Stan Karpenko, co-founder and CEO of Give Vision, was announced as the winner of WIRED Health’s EY Startup Stage. His product SightPlus is a pair of hands-free, easy-to-use goggles that enhance the wearer’s remaining vision. “Light is beamed into the eye of the visually impaired person, the camera captures the world, the software converts and ignites whatever the visually impaired person needs to see and this is our product that will be launching in 2018,” he told the panel of judges. The product, which looks like a pair of reading glasses, will be available on a subscription-based service, making it not only a unique product on the market, but also more accessible than the options currently out there.
Co-founder and chairman of Zebra Medical Vision, Eyal Gura, is using deep machine learning to diagnose diseases. The Zebra Research platform provides researchers with the world’s largest structured clinical data set. Using imaging analytics, it allows institutions to identify at-risk patients and offer preventative treatments. “Images are uploaded to a database where algorithms can identify the visual fingerprints of multiple diseases and instantly recognises and alerts to the disease, providing more affordable, quality care,” Gura says.
Matteo Carli, CTO of xbird, wants to use the data collected by wearables to detect critical health events and the behavioural patterns of diabetes sufferers. Xbird uses data science and machine learning to keep an automatic diary, which can be used to give context to symptoms experienced by patients and lead to a more specific treatment recommendation by their doctor. “The aggregation of this data [from sensors on wearables and smartphones] allows us to create a picture of your environment and your behaviour,” Carli told the EY Startup Stage. The data can be shared with a physician, who can identify exactly where the problem lies.
Intelligent Hormone Sciences (IHS) aims to help women manage their menopausal symptoms to eliminate every preventable, negative consequence of the condition. Co-founder of the startup, Marje Isabelle, told the EY Startup Stage that right now, “we’re all a bit confused because there’s [no treatment] coordinated, tailored or trusted that we can all get behind”. IHS is developing a wearable patch for women that can be used to monitor their symptoms from home without the need for needles, stress, or travel to a clinician. A machine learning database crunches real time bio-data, that is self-reported, along with the patient history and clinical evidence. “At the other end would come the suggested personalised prescription to better optimise those deficient hormones,” Isabelle said.
A trial of medical software system drfocused in the UK is currently saving clinicians up to 90 percent of their time traditionally spent filing paperwork. CEO and co-founder Kit Latham said medical software slows doctors down, makes their job more stressful and ultimately wastes 30 percent of their time. Drfocused has built a growing global volunteer network of more than 700 doctors, who help them prototype, beta test and build new products. “When you change jobs every three months, which you do as a doctor, you have to learn a completely different system in a different hospital, you have to change all your logins, so I think the future will be about seamless inter-operability and it will be lots of different software packages talking together,” Latham said.
Munich-based Glasschair is a smartglass-based app designed for electric wheelchair users. Co-founder Claudiu Leverenz told the EY Startup Stage the design can help people who have lost the ability to use their hands to gain more independence and freedom to move about in their day-to-day lives. “It's a steering system that’s based on a smartglass and you can steer your wheelchair handsfree solely by your head movement or by voice commands,” he said. Eventually, the goal for Glasschair is to become an everyday smart assistant. “They will not only be able to drive their wheelchair around but also operate appliances in their homes and other things around them, basically their own environment, so they are gaining some independence,” Leverenz said.
Health Clinic
Fundamental VR has developed an integrated virtual reality and haptic tool that is used to help train surgeons to administer drugs during knee surgery. The tool is paired with a virtual reality headset, and the wearer experiences all the sounds and sensations of what it's like to operate on a knee. “There’s an aim to emulate what you’ll actually feel when you perform open knee surgery,” production manager Mike Dickinson told WIRED. “Like a flight simulator, people can just keep going back and going back until they perfect it and our software will also tell you where you’re going right and where you’re going wrong.”
Dublin-based Food Marble has developed a small, portable, personal breath test device called Aire, which measures fermentation of sugars in the breath. CMO and co-founder James Brief, showcased the device, which is connected to an app that tracks the results, at the WIRED Health clinic. “It measures the activity of a bacteria in your gut. Our sensor technology looks for products of fermentation of FODMAP sugars and then we tell you what foods are compatible with you based on the levels of those sugars and your ability to tolerate them,” he told WIRED.
Nigel Gifford, chairman of Somerset-based Windhorse Aerospace, has designed a humanitarian UAV, the Pouncer, to deliver food to war and disaster zones. The drone has a three-metre-wide hull that can enclose vacuum-packed foods, whereas the actual structure is made from as yet unspecified baked components that can be eaten. Showcasing the model at the WIRED Health clinic, Gifford told us: “right now this could be used in Mosul, in Yemen, in Sudan, in the Jordanian/Syrian border and it could be used for any of the 185 natural disasters that happen every year."
Random42, based in London, is one of the first firms to develop animated sequences for virtual reality that can be used to demonstrate the mechanism of a drug or disease. Design technologist Oliver Ellmers gave WIRED a demonstration of the virtual reality animations, which are used mainly in presentations to pharmaceutical and medical clients. “We put the clients at a scale where they are at the same level of the microbiology that they’re trying to visualise,” he told WIRED. “Also, it's a more immersive and engaging way of showing this content by placing the viewer inside the environment as opposed to just looking at a 2D panel.”
London-based Immersive Rehab provides virtual reality games that help patients through rehabilitation. CEO and founder Dr Isabel Van De Keere told WIRED she hopes the program will speed up recovery in patients and encourage them to get into recovery programmes sooner after surgery. The game helps the brain re-develop neural pathways through repetitive actions. Eventually she wants to move the recovery process into the comfort of people’s homes. “When the price of the headsets comes down people will basically be able to do it in their homes, recover quicker, have it on when they're moving around as well, that really is the ultimate goal,” Van De Keere said.
London-based Digital Therapeutics has re-imagined the support network for smokers who actively want to quit. CEO Yusef Sherwani says there are ten million smokers in the UK, two-thirds of whom want to quit, but only three percent who are successful because face-to-face behavioural support isn’t sustainable. The app he has helped develop, Quit Genius, gamifies the process, while working towards a quit date. “Quit Genius builds on decades of evidence-based therapy in the form of cognitive behavioural therapy and it just makes [the journey] more cost effective and scaleable. So we’re repacking that patient therapy relationship with a patient and an app,” he told WIRED.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
