Ah, January. A month that can be counted on to bring the blues to some, the intention to reset and refresh to others. It is also the month that, for the past three decades, marks the annual pilgrimage of healthcare investors, ventures, and operators as they descend on San Francisco, affectionately known for many years as “JP Morgan Week”.
For those in the finance and business building part of the healthcare industry, it is an opportunity to refresh connections with colleagues spread across the globe, to fine tune the skill of coordinating three breakfast meetings that don’t overlap, to meet entrepreneurs dedicated to innovation in healthcare, and with the help of the now infamous ‘Novateur mobile app’, secure invites to the hottest evening socials.
It is an exhilarating and exhausting few days, but with practice in schedule optimization, typically translates to rewarding networking, competitive insights and priming of the pipeline for new investments – all true of my experience this year.
PITHY CONFERENCE COMMENTARY
Some savvy event planners have built parallel conferences that have become the ‘go to’ events for showcasing both emerging and growth stories of private companies. Running in parallel with the main JPM event, is the Biotech Showcase and the Digital Medicine & Medtech Showcase.
It was at the Medtech Showcase that David Suendermann-Oeft (“DSO”), the CEO of Relentless portfolio company Modality.AI, participated in a panel on the topic of ‘Discovery at Warp Speed: Unlocking the Power of AI & ML”. The panelists concurred on the value of collaboration, the need to share data to power discovery, and they expressed a fundamental concern about biased data. Models today lack demographic diversity.
On the theme of companies claiming to have unique assets ‘powered by AI’, DSO had the mic drop moment. ´If you don’t have the data, you need to be quiet. We have patients’ lives at stake.’
Bam! Right up there with the quote made infamous by renowned statistician, W. Edwards Deming: ‘In God we trust, all others must bring data.’
A favourite comment for me was when panelists were asked to make a prediction of where we will be in 30 years from now. One responded with, ‘I hope for more focus on wellbeing, understanding our biological vs chronological age, and transformation of medical practice that will be based on personalization drawn from data.´ Let’s hope these predictions come to fruition in the next couple of years, not decades. Team Relentless will continue to invest in accelerating this vision of our future.
Another inspiring session was, “Future Panel, Digital Therapeutics in the Next Decade” where investors and executives agreed that all the tools being developed today are only as good as the data that is training them. Diversity of data (again). Volume of data. Quality of useable data.
A CEO on this ‘Future Panel’ referred to results from a recent physician survey that included queries re appetite for new technology adoption. The most encouraging response? 50% of doctors anticipate using digital products within one year. That was motivating information to hear and a compelling conference data point worthy of amplification.
Digital therapeutics (Dtx) are a rapidly growing field that utilizes technology such as mobile apps, wearables, and virtual reality to deliver evidence-based interventions for a variety of medical conditions. The potential for digital therapeutics is vast and includes the ability to reach a larger patient population, provide more personalized treatment, and potentially lower healthcare costs. All impact objectives that Team Relentless has been pursuing since launch day.
RESONATING CONFERENCE THEMES FOR RELENTLESS
1. Data, data, data, data….the importance of using data to identify diseases early, to deliver personalized interventions and objectively track disease progression; data driven solutions remain critical to care delivery across acute and chronic care management.
2. Development of digital tools to facilitate remote-patient monitoring (aka “RPM”)
3. Patient Care Efficiency aka address the medical staffing shortage – have primary care physicians play a bigger role in patient management
4. Resilience of the Healthtech sector
Anecdotes shared during panels, presentations and 1:1 coffee meetings were both devastating and motivating. There is nothing like chatting with practicing physicians to get the truth bombs about everything from the firsthand impact of nursing shortages to the need for addressing the biological basis of mental healthcare versus symptom management. My overall impression from a couple of days at JPM23? While the venture financing environment has retracted, company attrition will be attached to quality, and data driven evidence-based solutions will thrive.
RELENTLESS PORTFOLIO JANUARY KEY NOTES
January 15th –Canary Medical announced as a winner in two BIG Award categories. This annual business awards program recognizes organizations, products, and people that are bringing new ideas to life in innovative ways. Canary Medical won in both the company as well as new product category for the canturioTE (TE = tibial extension).
January 20th – LUCID paper published in Frontiers in Digital Health. The paper outlines the company’s plans for development of a digital therapeutic; building on the insights gained from their clinical trial in anxiety, LUC-101 will be a software-based treatment incorporating LUCID’s therapeutic music AI to reduce neuropsychiatric symptoms of Alzheimer’s such as anxiety and agitation.
And of course, in keeping with tech trends, I tried out ChatGPT while crafting this RoundUp. Confession, one paragraph is generated by AI – can you pick it out? Interesting fact, ChatGPT has already established a name in healthcare, having passed the U.S. medical licensing exam and has secured co-authorship credits on multiple scientific papers. Wowza. The potential for technology is indeed stunning.
So, here we come February. Looking forward to a resilient rest of 2023!