In May 2017, Jess Mills’ mother, Former Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Tessa Jowell, was diagnosed with Glioblastoma. Since then, the musician has been managing her care and is now campaigning to remove the low ceiling created by the current standard of care for cancer in the UK. Her mission is to enable global collaboration between doctors to make the most innovative treatments available to everyone in the UK, irrespective of income or access. Jess Mills will be speaking at the annual WIRED Health event in 2018.
Mills will join others disrupting the health industry. In addition to health in humans, animals will feature at this year’s conference, thanks to veterinary surgeon at the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, Romain Pizzi, who will share his experience of pioneering keyhole surgery in wild animals. He is renowned for performing a world-first: brain surgery on a bear, as well as his work in developing new surgical approaches that save thousands of animals every year.
The ideas, research, and new technologies revealed on stage at the fifth WIRED Health event will centre around women’s health, the future of fertility, genomics, neuroscience, and how artificial intelligence is influencing the next wave of patient and doctor interactions. Joining Mills, Jowell, and Pizzi will be Sarah Teichmann, head of cellular genetics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, who is creating an atlas of human building blocks - all 37 trillion of them - and Claire Novorol, founder and chief medical officer of Ada Health GmbH, an AI-powered health companion that helps users to understand and manage their health. Tania Boler, CEO of Elvie, will discuss how her health and lifestyle brand is developing smarter technology for women. Elvie Trainer, for instance, is an award-winning Kegel trainer that helps women strengthen their pelvic floor with five-minute workouts.
In the area of neuroscience, new innovations are helping detect early stages of neurological disease or target worldwide health problems by stimulating the specific areas of the brain. Neuroscientist Dr Jason McKeown, CEO of Modius, will share how a health-tech headset can be used as a tool to combat obesity, by affecting parts of the brain associated with the metabolism. Joining him will be Robin L Carhart-Harris, head of psychedelic research at the centre of psychiatry division of brain sciences at the the Imperial College London. His clinical trials of psilocybin, a psychedelic ‘magic’ mushroom, is combating resistant depression. He has also developed a number of functional brain imaging studies with psilocybin, LSD, MDMA (ecstasy) and DMT. The audience will also have the chance to learn new ways of understanding approaches to early detection of dementia from Michael Hornberger, a clinical neuroscientist. His interactive smartphone game, Sea Hero Quest, is designed to efficiently crowdsource large amounts of research to aid in pinpointing the early stages of the disease.
Off stage, guests will be able to network with leaders in the field and interact with some of the cutting edge technology inspiring the future of medicine. After the main event, startups and scaleups will be able to take part in a new workshop hosted by Bupa’s customer lab and designed especially for new players in the health industry who have not had much experience with accelerators. It’s for anyone who wants to learn from experts what corporates are looking for in applications, pitches, what the process looks like – and what it takes to make things work in a large organisation. For those looking to gain further insights at the main event, Pamela Spence, the Global Life Sciences Lead at EY, will discuss how EY’s global life sciences industry practice – a team of more than 15,000 professionals – enable clients to deliver on their key strategic ambitions.
This special event is held in partnership with EY, Bupa and Modius, with the main conference taking place on March 13, 2018 at the Francis Crick Institute in London. The special 90-minute morning workshop dedicated to startups will take place on March 14, 2018 – this workshop has limited spaces available.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
