Doctors’ Note - Episode 8
Dear Patients and Friends,
Summer dawns and with that every music festival and medical conference is back in full force. We would have loved the opportunity to be there in person at the new Life Itself health congress in San Diego, and to revel in the magic of the Glastonbury music festival later this month, but we did attend WIRED Health and The Health Optimisation Summit in the last fortnight. This week our team in London is privileged to be chairing the Founders Forum Health Tech Summit. There really is nothing like hearing the unfettered views of the pioneers and investors of medicine and life-science, and health system chiefs from all corners of the globe.
High up on the agenda at these meetings is the revolution in empowerment of patients, with tech. Imagine your doctors trust you with a quality assurance app to test yourself well enough to give you the reassuring report, or a prescription, or a referral that you need - within an hour, without booking an appointment at all? Any time? 24/7? Sounds too good to be true? Perhaps for now. But the regulatory systems extant don’t understand how to trust patients however well trained and quality assured they might be. But we cracked the problem in the realm of banking where you can prove who you are, and are protected from your mistakes without booking with the bank manager or visiting your branch. Medicine is next.
Put simply, health systems can no longer cope, and there are hundreds of millions, if not billions of highly capable tech enabled humans in the world, either with minor ailments, a wish to screen themselves, or are experts by experience for more complex matters having lived with health conditions for years. These are people who just don’t need to book an appointment in person or on zoom with an expensive, overstretched professional who could be putting all their skills to play where AI is still far from capable. What breaks the camel’s back even for the most concierge of medical and performance teams is the multiple minor things asked of us that patients or their careers are more than capable to do on our behalf. We see the future of medicine including training large swathes of the population to become certified self-care practitioners working alongside their health care professionals, armed with apps that train and quality assure individuals on a whole myriad of simple matters. Eliminating every avoidable appointment and massively improving the speed and experience of the ‘customer’.
We have our biases but as an example of who’s presenting this week on patient empowerment, take a look at the new self test-to-treat service just launched by Certific.co - co-founded by our own Jack Kreindler and Taavet Hinrikus of Skype and TransferWise fame, with Estonian big industry innovation star, Liis Narusk. This kind of service is pushing the boundaries of what is possible in a highly regulated space and providing evidence that patients can do things to the same standards, if not better, than their local healthcare resources. Medable is doing the same in clinical trials. The wave has begun.
In this episode we attempt to sort out the wood from the trees, of which there is a lot to sort, at health tech and consumer longevity conferences. An experimental drug used in a study showed promising results with remission for all 12 patients, all of whom had been diagnosed with rectal cancer. This had scientists and doctors alike very, very intrigued. Magical cure or not, (it isn’t), it is definitely a step forward for the promise that personalized medicine is.
We cover the best things we saw at the Health Optimisation Summit in London recently. It was an overall mixed bag of experiences - a hyperbolic chamber of wishful thinking and weak evidence. However, there were some standout themes and products which, of course we share with you.
Lastly, there was a highlight from WIRED Health 2022, that we have checked the validation data for: especially relevant for men, the new direct-to-public MOJO home sperm testing kit for sperm has 97% accuracy with expert human eyes. It’s a DIY home sampling kit that preserves your semen for transit to Mojo’s lab which then uses its own custom robotic microscopes and computer vision to give you a sperm count and all the other metrics of your semen quality, completely privately and quickly. They give you an estimate of your overall semen ‘health’ which, as we know from fertility medicine, can change dramatically and rapidly with better lifestyle. Sperm banking (once you’ve upped your scores) is next on the cards for Mojo. Is this a new biomarker for health and human performance? Might it prompt lasting behavioral change when all else has failed. Let’s do a longitudinal study and see. Mojo are offering this at 50% off in June - a no-brainer, seemingly (no pun intended).
As ever wishing you and yours well,
Paul, Jack, Jim, Alex and the Team