Three thought-provoking takeaways from WIRED Health 2022

Medical innovation is in rude health. During the pandemic, European patent applications related to medtech, pharma and biotech saw a notable uptick at a time when numbers for many other fields declined. The current dynamism of these sectors was reflected in the roiling galaxy of ideas at WIRED Health 2022. Here are three that piqued WIRED Consulting's interest...

Nutrition needs to get personal

“We did the largest ever intervention study of food: we had 1,000 people, most of them twins, and gave them all identical meals,” said Dr. Tim Spector, Scientific Co-Founder of ZOE, at WIRED Health. “The big thing we noticed was a tenfold difference in the response of the glucose and insulin, and tenfold difference in the response in the fat levels and inflammation levels, after a meal. So the idea that we can all be compressed into one set of advice, when all of us respond differently to something – even if it has exactly the same calories – makes a nonsense of all everything we've learned before.”

Another finding was that one in four people had a significant dip in blood sugar three hours after a meal – this was associated with less energy and greater hunger. Over the course of 24 hours, people who had this dip ended up eating about 200 more calories. “So just think: you're eating the same thing. One person gets a dip, the other one doesn't. That's going to make you actually get overweight. If only you could find out and know whether you are a ‘dipper’ or not – wouldn't that be important? Also, that's a perfect experiment to show why ‘calories are all equal’ is complete nonsense.”

Precision healthcare has a gargantuan challenge

The expectations of precision medicine are high but they are legitimate, said Dr. Alessandro Riccombeni, National Genomics Officer at Microsoft, in his talk 'Prevent Illness Before It Happens'. Large-scale genetic sequencing promises to eradicate genetic diseases through the creation of predictive models, personalised drugs and risk factor-reducing nutrition plans. “But to get to that point, to get to that promise of preventing illness before it happens, there's still some work to do,” he said. A major issue is simply having the infrastructure to handle the data. “One of the projects being discussed today is sequencing every single newborn. [There are] 700,000 newborns per year: 100 petabytes of genomic data per year, one exabyte of data just over the first decade. One exabyte – if you don't know how big an exabyte is, let's put it this way: some academics estimated that five exabytes are enough to store every single word ever spoken by mankind…Eventually somebody will have to solve the challenge of managing exabytes of data.”

Gamifying research can be powerful

Hugo Spiers, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, told the audience at WIRED Health about Sea Hero Quest, the navigation-testing game he helped build to improve neurocognitive research. It has been downloaded millions of times, and the scale of the data – much wider than would be achievable with a conventional lab study – has yielded some interesting findings. For one, sleep and navigation abilities are related. “People who tell us they get seven hours of sleep perform better on cognitive tasks that tap into memory and planning,” said Spiers. Also relevant is where you lived as a child. “Growing up outside cities – rural and suburbs – are better for your navigational skill,” he said. “We can see that there is quite a significant advantage.”

So, get more sleep and move to the countryside? We’ve had less appetising prescriptions.

WIRED Consulting is proud to work with clients across the healthcare landscape. Our latest report explores why now is a pivotal moment for the NHS’ tech evolution.

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