Global
By Vicky Rothwell, lead enterprise architect at Aire Logic Artificial intelligence has become healthcare’s latest “whizz-bang” technology, dominating boardroom conversations, filling conference agendas and prompting increasingly ambitious predictions about how services could be transformed. The excitement is understandable. Applied well, AI could improve screening programmes, reduce administrative pressure, and give overstretched healthcare professionals more time [...]
Gene therapy partly restored sight in some blind people, with limited side effects reported in a 10-patient trial of an optogenetic treatment. The approach, known as optogenetic therapy, uses light to switch nerve cells on and off, a technique recognised by the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It was previously shown to partly [...]
A phase 3 retatrutide trial found reduced body weight, improved blood sugar and lower inflammation markers in adults with obesity and type 2 diabetes. The drug, which is not yet approved by any regulatory agency, mimics three gut hormones involved in appetite, blood sugar and metabolism: GLP-1, GIP and glucagon. Unlike drugs that target GLP-1 [...]
The World Health Organization (WHO) has called for tighter ethics oversight of AI health research, warning that existing safeguards may not always be equipped to address novel risks. The organisation says artificial intelligence is changing how health data are analysed, research is conducted and new technologies are developed and evaluated. It warns that AI-related research [...]
Surgeon.AI has launched an AI-powered platform combining surgical education, career development and personalised learning for surgeons worldwide. Professor Shafi Ahmed, a surgeon and healthcare technology innovator, launched the platform to support surgeons from medical school and training through to consultant or attending level. Central to the platform is ELLA, the Education, Learning and Language Agent, [...]
A new global initiative will see labs across the world harness wastewater as an early warning system for public health protection. Global Wastewater Day will bring together scientists, governments, water utilities and public health organisations to use wastewater as an early warning system for future pandemics. The initiative will coordinate sampling on 31 March 2027, [...]
By James Hitchen, patent attorney, HGF A single telehealth consultation may involve a patient's phone in Manchester, a clinician's terminal in Madrid, an inference model running on cloud infrastructure in Virginia, and a device manufacturer's telemetry service in Bengaluru. The technology is built to ignore borders. However, the patents protecting it cannot, as each of [...]
A low-cost artificial intelligence tool built by researchers at the Wharton School and Penn Engineering is helping to get essential medicines to the communities in Sierra Leone that need them most, by forecasting demand and correcting for missing data. The researchers partnered with Sierra Leone's government to build a decision-support system that uses machine learning [...]
From scientific discovery and clinical research to manufacturing and market access, the next era of biotech innovation may belong to ecosystems that collaborate rather than compete. Walking the BIO International Convention floor in San Diego, two national pavilions stand out for more than their size. The United Kingdom and India have both arrived with a [...]
An international study is using smartphones and wearables to improve digital heart monitoring, with an additional pathway planned for people with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). Researchers from Imperial College London’s National Heart and Lung Institute have joined UK collaborators and the Stanford University team behind the My Heart Counts app. The study aims to help [...]
