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 

????️‍????️ Canon has made the first installations of its Aquilion ONE / INSIGHT Edition CT system in two  European healthcare facilities – the Royal Bournemouth Hospital in the UK and the University of Strasbourg in France. The innovative medical imaging system is focused on improving healthcare outcomes and operational excellence. The CT scanner simplifies complicated scans for clinicians, elevates those that are more routine, and is easy to operate regardless of the level of experience or how specialised the scan is, thereby optimising clinical workflow systems. 

???? Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Finnish health technology company Solu announce today a collaboration to study and understand hospital-acquired infections from an epidemiological and antibiotic resistance perspective. Solu’s platform simplified microbial genome sequencing and analysis and offers an end-to-end service that provides insight into the causes of antibiotic resistance and whether the infection is hospital-acquired. Hospital-acquired infections are often resistant to antibiotics, and the challenge to understand the risk and prevent the spread of HAIs remains a major problem, leading to longer hospital stays and increased costs, impact on staff safety and the quality of care patients receive. The collaboration between Solu and Cedars-Sinai aims to gain a comprehensive epidemiologic and genomic characterisation, examine the correlation between antibiotic resistance and clinical outcomes, and explore the similarity of certain isolates. 

???? SimBioSys, a leading innovator in precision oncology, and General Inception (“GI”), a global company Igniter, have formed a strategic partnership that aims to significantly reduce oncology drug development times and cut development costs by using AI and biophysical modelling to better understand unique tumour spatial biophysical characteristics. PhenoScope, SimBioSys’ powerful proprietary technology and service, can analyze vast fields of multi-modal data seamlessly, generating novel insights, including unique spatial biophysical insights in 4-dimension space, for cancer drug discovery and development which are not apparent by looking at one type of data alone. Drawing on SimBioSys’ data of more than 12,000 individual cancer patient profiles in 33 solid cancers, and a virtual tumor bank of more than 20,000 spatially resolved tumors, equivalent to more than 100 terabytes of proprietary data, PhenoScope can be used in drug development to predict personalized patient response over time, including drug binding and metabolic response, as well as dosing capabilities across every scenario and delivery. 

???? Otsuka Pharmaceutical, Co. Ltd. and Click Therapeutics, Inc., announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared Rejoyn™ (developed as CT-152), the first prescription digital therapeutic authorized for the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD) symptoms as an adjunct to clinician-managed outpatient care for adult patients with MDD age 22 years and older who are on antidepressant medication. Rejoyn is intended to reduce MDD symptoms. Rejoyn is a six-week treatment program designed to help enhance cognitive control of emotion through a combination of clinically-validated cognitive emotional training exercises for the brain and brief therapeutic lessons. Unlike wellness apps, the Rejoyn app is a medical device authorized by the FDA for prescription by a healthcare professional. 

????‍⚕️ Thousands of people unknowingly living with hepatitis C are to be identified, diagnosed and cured thanks to major NHS investment in rapid testing technology and an extension of a ground-breaking medicines deal. New liver scanning and portable testing units will be deployed in a range of communities where patients are at high risk of contracting the infection. This includes on community clinical outreach vans, at drug and alcohol support services, or at special testing events in some GP practices as part of the final phase of the dedicated hepatitis C Elimination Programme, which could see England become to first country in the world to eliminate the virus as a public health threat. 

❓ Did you know that 

A new report has praised UK healthcare businesses for their investment in creative roles, with the sector featuring in a list of the top ten industries investing the most into creative teams, with almost 18 in 100 members of staff now working in creative roles.

Analysing data from LinkedIn, the report from brand communications agency Warbox ranks the in-house creative headcount of ‘design’ roles across a number of UK companies in traditionally ‘less creative’ industries, compared to overall headcount, to find which sectors place the highest value on creativity within their workforce.

The healthcare industry came top of the list (17.87% of headcount) with building and construction (12.29%) and homeware and interiors (11.12%) businesses completing the top three.

???? What we’re reading 

EU institutions last month reached a deal on rules governing the new European Health Data Space (EHDS), setting a common European framework for the sharing of health data. The agreement envisions the sharing of sensitive health data across the EU for research, innovation, public health, policy-making and regulatory purposes. One issue divided lawmakers throughout the negotiations: the secondary use of data. This means re-use of data already registered by health services by third parties for research, innovation and public health purposes. These third parties can be public, private and non-profit entities as well as individual researchers. The full details are available in this story from euronews.health. 

???? Upcoming events 

8 April, Berlin – MedTech World Berlin Roadshow

16 April, Cambridge – CHIME CIO Summit – CHIME International 

24-25 April, ExCeL London – Digital Healthcare Show