Digital Health Coffee Time Briefing ☕

Your morning summary of digital health news, information and events to know about if you want to be “in the know”.   

👇 News  

✔ Phesi, a global provider of patient-centric data analytics, has announced it has reached a critical milestone, with its AI-driven Trial Accelerator Platform now containing global data from more than 100 million patients. This unparalleled volume of data will allow sponsors to access data on patients with more than 4,000 indications, plan more successful trials, and simulate clinical development activity with a high degree of accuracy.

🤝 Alife Health, a fertility technology company building AI tools to advance in-vitro fertilization (IVF), announced today that it has partnered with Ovation Fertility, a US Fertility company and national network of laboratories to pilot the world’s first embryo image cataloguing software. This software could enable future AI-powered embryo selection. Alife’s Embryo Assist software enables embryologists to seamlessly create digital records of every embryo, with the added benefit of leveraging Alife’s Clinical Decision Support (CDS) algorithm to determine the best embryo for transfer. 

💰 Britain on Tuesday said it would spend more than 100 million pounds ($125 million) to launch nine new research hubs in artificial intelligence and train regulators about the technology. Nearly 90 million pounds would go towards the hubs, which will focus on using AI in areas including healthcare, chemistry and mathematics, and a partnership with the United States on responsible AI, the government said. Another 10 million pounds would help regulators address the risks and harness the opportunities of AI, it said, such as developing practical tools to monitor risks in sectors from telecoms and healthcare to finance and education. 

💊 Closed Loop Medicine Ltd, a leading TechBio company developing combination prescription drug plus software therapy products that deliver personalised dose optimisation, has announced the publication of a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of the American Heart Association. The study describes results of the PERSONAL-CovidBP clinical trial; demonstrating the capabilities of the company’s integrated precision care solution, CLM-HT01, to successfully control blood pressure whilst minimising side effects and supporting medication adherence in participants with primary hypertension. The findings will be applied to drive further development of CLM-HT01 and the company’s extended pipeline of combination products in other therapeutic areas, aiming to deliver precision dosing at population scale.

😣 Persistent pain, which is often incurable, affects between 31.5% to 53% of people across the UK, with symptoms ranging from mild discomfort to debilitating pain. To help tackle this growing issue, researchers in Wales are stepping up with the help of Wales’s national health research registry, Healthwise Wales — to embark on a study known as the Persistent Pain Project. Launched earlier this year, the Persistent Pain Project will track participants for a two-year period — to determine the psychological and lifestyle factors that may contribute to people developing persistent pain. The researchers are currently recruiting a range of participants, including those who experience persistent pain and others which only experience occasional pain — whether it’s through migraines, sickness or injury. 

❓ Did you know that 

Three quarters (75%) of healthcare organisations would relinquish some control to enable decisions to be made quicker by specialists on cyber threats, according to new research by Threat Detection and Response provider, e2e-assure.  Having a solid cyber security defence strategy is of urgent importance for healthcare organisations, with e2e-assure’s study finding the vast majority of healthcare organisations (77%) have experienced a cyber attack. Worryingly, only 13% describe their cyber security provider or in-house team as “exceeding expectations,” which is lower than the average across industries* at 16%. 

📖 What we’re reading 

Medriva – The Revolutionary Role of 3D Data and AI in the Future of Digital Health and Radiology 

🚨 This week’s events 

8-9 February, Birmingham – HSJ Digital Transformation Summit