Giving the Future of Health a Stage

Project150 aims to be a new conduit for health content to hear what an unusual mix of experts are thinking, from behind the scenes. We’re wrapping together the latest in health and human performance, longevity science and eudaimonia (human-flourishing) research. As part of the founding team here, and as the Chief Content Officer, I feel privileged to be working on another way of changing how the story of science is told. A key part of my journey into exploring the future of health, and how I came to meet ‘Dr Jack’ Kreindler, is through WIRED. Here is how the story goes:

In 2013, my then editor at WIRED magazine asked me to compile a report setting out the case for a new live event around medicine and health. By then, WIRED had already launched a successful annual conference — featuring speakers like the 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki, Icelandic singer-songwriter Bjork, rapper Will.I.Am, and the architect Zaha Hadid— and we wanted to expand our live events business. The decision to take a deep dive into health seemed like an obvious one.

Developments like affordable sensors, ubiquitous mobile devices, faster genomics and advances in neuroscience were driving a new trend of personalised medicine and data-driven health. As WIRED’s science editor then, I was also naturally converging to many of these stories, writing longform articles about topics like software as medical treatment for mental illness and the role of neurophysiology on decision-making. It was clear to me that, even within the wide remit of WIRED, we would be finding the most exciting innovation stories at the interface of technology and biology. That’s why we launched WIRED Health, an annual one-day festival about the big ideas, new technological developments and the many untold stories in health and medicine that deserved to be told.

Our first event took place in 2014, at the Royal College of General Practitioners in London, and the list of speakers reflected the excitement and potential of that new frontier of science and technology, with stories of medical brilliance and scientific progress, from sensors to big data, from nanotechnology to behavioural psychology. “The future now” is WIRED’s guiding editorial line, an oxymoron that reflects well the kind of speakers I invited: academics like John Coates, a former Wall Street Trader who studied the role that our hormones play in the way we make decisions; inventors like Billy Boyle, who made a handheld device to diagnose cancer; Elli Kaplan, CEO of Neurotrack, who developed a software to predict if you were going to develop Alzheimer’s just by tracking the way you look at a computer screen; and the founder of Jointly Health, a young medical doctor with an ambition to use machine learning algorithms to predict chronic health problem before they occurred — his name was Jack Kreindler. 

The success of that first event kickstarted a series of events which continued uninterrupted (even during the pandemic) until today, making WIRED Health one the brand’s most successful events. As I write, I’m finalising the agenda of our tenth edition of the conference (health.wired.com), which will take place May 26 at King’s Place, in London, and include extraordinary speakers like the world’s most frequently cited neuroscientist, Karl Friston, and the inventor of the iPhone, Tony Fadell.  

Looking back at the names and the topics featured in each of those past events provides a clear picture of how health tech has evolved since 2014. Many trends are clear, from the application of AI in healthcare to the big investments that big tech companies like Alphabet and Facebook began making in this space. You can also see pioneering work in new fields like longevity and psychedelics appearing as early as 2015 — today, these are dominant trends. It’s remarkable that while each event is a snapshot of what was happening in the industry at the time, it also provided a clear indication of what was to come. 

Looking back, it’s also striking how many of those keynote talks withstood the test of time, providing enduring moments that even today remain powerful and compelling to watch. It’s impossible to pick the best moments, but here’s a short selection: 

1/ Nigel Ackland: the world’s most advanced prosthetic arm: “I’m just an ordinary man and I’m fortunate to wear an extraordinary piece of technology.” Ackland was the first patient in the world to be fitted with the RSL Steeper’s Bebionic3 myoelectric prosthetic hand. In his talk, Ackland speaks candidly about the pain and frustration as he initially struggled to find a suitable artificial limb (at some point, he was given an actual hook), leading him to consider suicide. His speech is a powerful and emotional reminder of the power of medical technology to change lives.

2/Lama Nachman: Giving Stephen Hawking a Voice: For most of his lifetime, the world’s smartest man depended on an outdated piece of software to communicate with the outside world. Intel had been supporting Stephen Hawking’s computer since the late nineties, but by 2011 the famous physicist, who suffered from ALS, was struggling to use the system, managing only to write an average of one word per minute. "My speech input is very, very slow these days,” he wrote to Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. “Is there any way Intel could help?" In this talk, Lama Nachman, senior engineer at Intel, tells us what it was like to develop a bespoke user interface for Professor Hawking.

3/ Jeremy Farrar: “UN and WHO ‘not fit for purpose’ to tackle pandemics”: In 2016, Farrar, the Director of the Wellcome Trust, put forward a powerful — and prescient — argument defending the need to invest against future pandemics in the same way we invest in the military. “This has to be incentivised by governments, taxpayers and philanthropy, then industry has to be persuaded that it's in their interest. Otherwise we are leaving a potentially disastrous situation in the hands of the marketplace." We should have listened. 

4/ Nir Barzilai: “The future of ageing” (unfortunately, his talk is not available online, but WIRED has recently released a mini-documentary featuring his work) Longevity Genes and Metformin: The World’s First Anti-Ageing Drug?: If today the notion that growing old is something that can potentially be cured is something that’s widely accepted in the medical community, we’ve Barzilai to thank for. The director at the Institute for Aging Research in New York City is one of the longevity’s true pioneers after his research on the anti-aging properties of metformin, a drug originally designed to treat diabetes. In this talk he detailed his research on more than 30 other drugs, including rapamycin, which increased mice lifespan by 24 per cent in trials. “We could all live until we’re 115 if we start treating the symptoms of ageing”.

5/ Mary Lou Jepsen: “How we can use light to see deep inside our bodies and brains”: Jepsen is one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent and influential inventors, an engineer with over 200 patents who has worked for Google X and Facebook’s virtual reality projects. In 2016, she founded Openwater, a startup developing a portable fMRI brain scanner that you could fit inside a hat. The technology works in real-time by scattering red light through the body to detect traumatic brain injuries and cancer tumours. The company is set to launch the first devices this year. 

6/ Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci: COVID Vaccine pioneers: In October 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Sahin, the co-founder of BioNTech, spoke at the first virtual WIRED Health about the COVID-19 vaccine he was developing using mRNA therapeutics, a technology he had been developing for over 20 years. He reported then that early results were encouraging, with expectation that they would be able to deliver a vaccine with an efficacy of about 60 per cent. A few weeks later, BioNTech announced to the world the first COVID-19 vaccine, with an efficacy of over ninety percent. Sahin and BioNTech’s co-founder, Ozlem Tureci, spoke at the event the following year about their progress on developing vaccines for cancer and malaria. 

Other unmissable WIRED Health talks: 

• Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, on creativity and being unable to visualise

• Jennifer Doudna, Nobel Prize-winning co-inventor of CRISPR, on editing disease out of our DNA

• Jack Kreindler, on why health innovators must refocus on access (featuring Marje and baby Sienna)

It will soon be a decade now that Jack and I have worked together, co-curating many special guests for the WIRED health stage and for WIRED magazine. Aside from that, we have coached dozens of breakthrough biotech innovators for the likes of Exponential Medicine, Founders Forum, TEDx and other global stages. It feels like this has made a tangible difference to the sector, and certainly separated the wheat from the chaff.

Project150 adds a new aspect to such stages with the added ability to translate bold innovation into what professionals will in future prescribe. This we believe is a first: Engaging communication and cutting-edge practice, entwined.