Musings from London Tech Week 2025 - HealthTech
It’s not everyday you get to see the UK’s Prime Minster at a Tech industry conference. London Tech Week is a little over 10 years old starting off in Shoreditch as a Tech networking event and now we have Kier Starmer announcing Tech policy on stage with a guy worth a touch over $250 billion who says the UKs AI workforce is the envy of the world. Then again, you don’t get that kind of rich without blowing a lot of smoke up a lot of arses.
The MedicubeX eHealth body scanner provides “autonomous self-measurement of vital signs, cardiovascular diseases and diabetes risks takes 5 minutes to do a scan.” …… I saw 36 people queuing to jump into the portal-potty-style booth. It takes 5 mins per scan, and at best 1 minute to swap “patients”. Which means folks who had paid £700 for a ticket to London Tech Week were prepared to wait over 3 1/2 hours for a scan. That’s quite a commitment.
Maybe this shows just how successful a service that provides an automated health scan can be. Someone should commercialise this. Err… hello, Neko Health - the latest startup by Spotify’s Daniel Ek which offers a full body scan for £300. You can sign up here for early access: https://neko.is/se/en/waitlist/SP4304nr
Currently these scanners are only available in Stockholm and London. So how can we catch and prevent diseases through early diagnosis elsewhere, especially in remote locations with limited access to healthcare like Tawang, Kaokoland or Lecieter? Well, Qure.AI who are part of AstraZeneca’s A.Catalyst Network have been busy collecting and analysing 5 million chest X-Rays from 20 countries. Then they use their AI Agent to analyse nodules and detect signs of lung cancer.
Talking of AZ, they were the only Life Science company to have a booth at London Tech Week: Repeat: THEY HAVE A BOOTH AT LONDON TECH WEEK. Who’d have thought a pharma company would go all in at a tech event like this? Well, I did around 13 years ago when I spoke about how life sciences and tech companies would merge and start competing, but that’s beside the point.
Click here for my review of AZs CIO, Cindy Hoots presentation at London Tech Week
GSK were also at LTW but opted to sponsor the cafe. They also used the conference to do some free guerilla crowdsourcing on digital transformation, asking:
What’s the biggest potential for Gen AI to transform employee experience? How can leaders promote a tech enabled culture? What’s the most exciting AI application in healthcare?
Not sure if the final results are being published … but here are some data as of Tuesday 10th at 10:49
GSK also participated on panel (featuring Boris Borden from AWS who partnered with Slalom last year at Reuters at our a joint-branded booth). On discussing the impact of AI on drug discovery he said: “What was predicted to be done in next 50 will now be done in the next 5.” Which is pretty mind blowing.
And during questions from the audience, someone pithily quipped “If AI were to find a cure for cancer, who would get a Nobel prize?”
Good question given both GSK and AZ were very keen to talk about just how much AI they’re using in drug discovery. 85% apparently according to AZs Liz Nevin. In fact, Anne Phelan (SVP Target Discovery GSK) talked about how their AI discovery bots come up with their own experiment hypothesis and sometimes go off and expire targets that the scientists don’t understand why. She also didn’t say, biscuits have been mysteriously disappearing from the kitchen and they suspect the agents are pinching them.
But brand-new cutting edge, revolutionary, mind-boggling complex, AI driven science is all well and good but if it can’t be deployed by a creaking, underfunded health system, then we have a problem. It’s harder to get an NHS appointment than it is to get on the London Tech Week WiFi (irony not lost on me) so what’s actually exciting Caroline Clarke Regional Director for London NHS England? “Ambient voice”, apparently… which is Alexa? But she did announce the launch of a focussed partnership program to develop system solutions across 5 areas including Cardiovascular and Mental Health. And also that NHS London have identified some prioritised digital pathways :
⁃ Skin (cancer detection using AI)
⁃ Eye care
Lots of HealthTech startups dusted off their business plans at that news.
Rando-stat: Amazon detect and delete around 250million fake reviews of products a second. Or might been a day. Or possibly a week. It was early and whatever the timeframe, it was a lot.
Second rando-stat: The future additional power needs to run AI for a nation like Britain is about the same as the entire current power need for a country the size of Japan. And we’re going to need that increase every few years.
Finally, one of my favourite moments was Amol Sarva from HealthX Ventures who louchely captivated us whilst bashing us around the ears with his ‘dude-bro’ ‘tude. While taking about the additional cardio, renal, neurological etc benefits that are emerging in the GLP-1s he blithely stated: “Everyone should just take Ozempic. Why wouldn’t you for like 100 bucks a month”
There is some truth in that, dude.
Some Links
https://www.eu-startups.com/directory/medicubex-ltd/
https://www.healthxventures.com/
Advisory, Consultancy, Martech & Managed Content services built for Pharma. Ex GSK, Novartis & Boehringer Ingelheim. Create Content that Connects ❤
3moAlways on on point, only you could bring nhs waiting list and trying to get into tech week into focus. Great read as always. Musings indeed, but some powerful thoughts in here , encourage people to read this piece by John