Ten ways we can use technology to reduce health inequity
Enabling everyone to live healthy lives for longer is core to our mission. At the first Ada Ventures Health Equity dinner, we challenged portfolio founders, investors, and LPs to envisage a future for healthcare that works for everyone.
The Lord Darzi report on the state of the NHS and its description of “worrying health inequities” was a sobering read. It was compounded this month by news that the UK has the worst life expectancy in western Europe. But there are some glimmers of hope for health in the UK — and systems more globally.
One of those glimmers was highlighted during our fireside chat with Tamsin Berry OBE at the first Ada Ventures Health Equity dinner on the eve of the Jefferies London Healthcare Conference, the largest healthcare-dedicated conference in Europe and a hub for innovation and investment.
Tamsin is a partner at Population Health Partners, an investment company focused on transforming health outcomes for populations using innovative therapeutics. She has had an impressive career in the civil service as Director of the Office for Life Sciences, tackling diseases like dementia. She also played a key role in the UK’s Covid taskforce. During the chat she focused on that glimmer of optimism for improving the NHS and narrowing health inequity more generally, what Lord Darzi termed the “Tilt towards tech”.
We couldn’t agree more here at Ada Ventures. We are living in the exponential age of technology, producing huge scientific breakthroughs in healthcare in multiple ways — faster paths from lab to clinic to patient; more efficient health systems; a shift to preventative medicine; and unprecedented insight into our own risk factors for developing diseases to name a few.
It might now be an occasion to shine a light on some of our portfolio companies who were present at the dinner and how they are using tech to improve health in underserved groups. They embody what we’re trying to achieve with Ada Ventures and our thesis to invest to enable healthier lives for longer. We are particularly interested in companies addressing women’s health; mental health; metabolic syndrome conditions including cardiovascular disease, obesity, fatty liver disease (NASH) and diabetes.
Dr Julia Fan Li is aiming to build the world’s first spatial proteomics engine for drug discovery as co-founder of Micrographia Bio. We led a pre-seed round of £1.75m in Micrographia Bio alongside Entrepreneur First, Samos Investments and Saras Capital.
MultiOmic Health is an AI platform to find solutions for Metabolic Syndrome (MetSyn), a medical condition that contributes to around 42% of global deaths a year. It’s co-founded by Robert Thong, with his son and co-founder Alasdair Thong, who was also present at the dinner as a Venture Partner. We co-led a seed round of £5m in MultiOmic Health with Hoxton Ventures, MMC and Verve.
Dr Camilla Easter is CEO of Oxford Medical Products, a UK-based biotechnology start-up revolutionising the weight-loss treatment space with its non-pharmacological technology. We led a pre-seed round of £500k in OMP with angels.
Hana Janebdar, founder of Juno Bio, a start-up that uses cutting-edge sequencing technology to decode the vaginal microbiome. We led a seed round of c.£1m into Juno Bio with Entrepreneur First, Ace Cap and angels.
It was the right night to talk about health, impact and technology. We were surrounded by health-tech founders like Dr Jason Mellad and Arya Tandon, as well as Limited Partners and VCs — everyone present was either a builder, researcher or investor in the next generation of transformative companies. We didn’t “tilt” towards tech, we leant right in.
Our discussions revolved around gender and racial disparities in access to care; mental health and young people; better access to health data for individual patients; and the next generation of diagnostic tools. As usual, our dinners are under Chatham House Rule to allow participants to speak openly and honestly about what they want to see change in health equity. But we did come up with something resembling a manifesto.
Our manifesto for health equity.
1. Intervene earlier
Take earlier action to reduce the risk of disease and health problems in our populations. Too often we only administer drugs to the sickest when early intervention and medical care could stop serious health issues.
So many things are diagnosed on a symptomatic basis but by the time these symptoms manifest, the condition often can only be treated with drugs. The problem is that the current incentives to intervene earlier are not attractive. Relatively inexpensive diagnostic tools could predict people’s likelihood of developing serious diseases; early intervention would to stop the diseases developing, or limit their severity.
2. Fund diagnostics, not just drugs
Diagnostics capabilities are going to be improved by advances in technology. This is hugely exciting but we need investors to pay attention to the potential of next-generation diagnostics.
VC funds and pharma companies are often put off funding or bringing diagnostic technology to market by the limited size of financial outcomes in the early intervention and diagnostics space. Instead, they continue to pour billions into developing drugs for rare diseases.
3. Look holistically
Don’t conflate healthcare with medical care. There are so many more factors to health, including social determinants like finances, work, housing and the environment. And we need to be mindful of the nuances. We discussed the tipping point in health as infectious diseases are superseded by chronic ones.
4. Release the data
The strength and depth of public data that can be leveraged from healthcare organisations like the NHS and studies and sample collections like Our Future Health or the British Biobank is remarkable. The strength of these datasets, unique to the UK, is yet to be fully capitalised on. Practical suggestions included creating regional hubs of hospitals and doctors for data sharing or restructuring the data compliance responsibilities so they don’t fall so heavily on primary healthcare practitioners. More radical ideas included introducing regulation to mandate that companies open their data and access to their products via APIs — creating an ‘Open Health’ ecosystem which could replicate the success of Open Banking.
5. Use AI, but use it properly
AI will only be a boon in removing biases from healthcare if we focus on the quality of data and how it is executed. Diverse participation — in terms of different races, ages and genders — in trials is an imperative to aid discovery but also research dosage. There are huge biological differences between people — even between those viewed as the standard patient, white males.
6. Make patients active in their own healthcare
The fact data is localised in primary care and there are no centralised health records for the UK makes it very hard for patients to be active participants in their own care. Innovators should be working to empower patients. Healthcare start-ups need to incorporate Patient Participation and Involvement (PPI) strategies from the beginning, thereby involving ordinary people and local communities in the planning, commissioning, delivery and evaluation of the health and social care services destined to them.
7. Consider the care giver
The role and challenges of caregivers and communities were highlighted in the discussion. Mental health in young people is a real issue, but it also affects their parents. There was also mention of a study featured in The Lancet last year, which showed that by giving food to tuberculosis patients and — crucially — to their families and caregivers too helped eliminate TB and its transmission alongside more traditional means like drugs and vaccines.
8. Think outside the box
There are pioneering solutions out there for all sorts of health conditions, including neurodevelopmental conditions and mental-health issues (which have nothing to do with reducing screen time!). Guests cited studies looking at treating autism and ADHD in young people with probiotics or research into just how much the microbiome of mothers and their babies affects the child’s developing immune system. There is so much untapped opportunity out there for the health-tech start-ups of the future.
9. Adopt a longer-term approach for investment
We need to change people’s minds on the economics of health; we should be investing in health for the wealth of the nation. We should be targeting ministers of finance not just ministers of health. There was an interesting point about the chronic underfunding of women’s health and how that might now change as women are considered “economic units” who pay taxes. The book The Longevity Imperative by Andrew Scott was recommended.
10. View the NHS as a catalyst for global change
If we can harness NHS data and make it available to innovators securely, we can build a truly revolutionary healthcare system and unleash medical innovation. The speed with which the Covid-19 vaccine programme was formulated and delivered offers a lot of hope. The government is already looking at “investing in secure data environments to power life-saving research and treatments”. Hopefully they will make this available to researchers and innovators.
In spite of its weaknesses, the NHS is a benchmark for many other health systems all over the world. Innovation in the NHS can catalyse change in healthcare systems in other regions and help underserved populations globally.
