Researchers Train Immune System to Tackle Drug-Resistant Infections
Researchers at Trinity College Dublin have trained macrophages with interferon gamma, dramatically improving their ability to destroy drug‑resistant Staphylococcus aureus and tuberculosis bacteria. The technique, termed "trained immunity," reprograms the innate immune system to respond faster and more aggressively without relying on traditional antibiotics. Early laboratory data suggest the method could also work against fungi and viruses, offering a host‑directed alternative to the dwindling antibiotic pipeline. The team plans further studies to assess safety and broader applicability before clinical trials.
Dr-Julian Helps Deliver Breakthrough Mental Health Support for Black and Ethnically Minoritised Mothers
Dr-Julian teamed with The Essential Baby Company to launch the haPPIE SHE Cares pilot, a digital perinatal mental‑health service for Black and ethnically minoritised mothers. The programme achieved 100% therapy initiation, 90% completion and a 74% recovery rate, far surpassing...
McDermott Will & Schulte Advises Amulet Capital Partners on Acquisition of TFP Fertility Group
Amulet Capital Partners, a healthcare‑focused private equity firm, is buying TFP Fertility Group, a leading fertility provider in the UK and Northern Europe, from Benefit Street Partners. The acquisition was announced on May 7, with financial terms not disclosed. McDermott Will...
WWL Embeds National Clinical Guidance Into Altera Digital Health’s Sunrise EPR to Transform Acute Abdomen Pathway
Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust partnered with Altera Digital Health to embed National Emergency Laparotomy Audit (NELA) guidance into its Sunrise Electronic Patient Record. The integration automated decision support, one‑click CT ordering, and risk scoring, driving...
Blood Test Help Personalise Depression Treatment
NeuroKaire, an Israeli startup, has launched BrightKaire—a blood‑based test that uses patient‑derived stem cells to create frontal brain neurons and assess how 70 different antidepressants affect neural connectivity. The test, now approved in Israel and the United States, promises to...
Living ‘Tumour on a Chip’ Could Offer New Brain Cancer Insights
Researchers at Nottingham Trent University, in partnership with biotech firm Kirkstall Ltd, have built a living tumour‑on‑chip that mimics the human blood‑brain barrier to study glioblastoma. The microfluidic device cultivates patient‑derived brain‑cancer cells alongside a synthetic barrier, enabling real‑time monitoring...
Forus Raises US$160m for AI-Powered Medicine Platform
Formerly known as Tandem, Forus announced a $160 million funding round led by Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Accel and other top VCs to scale its AI‑powered platform that links doctors, payers, pharmacies and biopharma. The platform automates insurance authorisation, financial assistance...
NHS England’s Formal Recognition of Informatics Profession Brings CPD, Career Paths and Opportunity
NHS England and the Federation of Informatics Professionals (FedIP) have formalised a professional register for digital health and care staff, making membership mandatory for senior roles and rolling out to all DDaT employees by March 2031. The framework introduces compulsory...
Health Tech World Brings NHS Procurement Insider to Exclusive AI Event
Health Tech World’s in‑person event "Unlocking the Healthcare AI Opportunity" adds Hugo Dragonetti, procurement and systems manager at NHS London Procurement Partnership, as its fifth panelist. The conference, co‑hosted with Teesside University London, will dissect the current state of AI...
ChatGPT Adds Mental Health Safety Feature
OpenAI is introducing Trusted Contact, an optional safety feature that lets adult ChatGPT users nominate a single trusted person to be alerted if the AI detects serious self‑harm language. The system first notifies the user, then a trained human reviewer...
AI-Enabled Care: Transforming Safety and Independence for Vulnerable Adults
The UK’s ageing population and 15 million mobility‑limited adults are straining health and social services, prompting a shift toward AI‑enabled home care. Predictive algorithms can analyze activity, medication adherence, and sleep patterns to flag risks before crises emerge, potentially cutting emergency...
Cera and uMed Announce New Partnership
Cera, Europe’s largest HealthTech provider, has partnered with uMed’s automated living registry platform to bring clinical trial recruitment into patients’ homes. The collaboration leverages Cera’s network of over 2.5 million monthly home‑care visits and uMed’s regulated digital consent platform to reach...
Dispensing Music Like a Drug: The New Frontier in Optimising Health Outcomes
AI‑driven music therapy is emerging as a measurable clinical intervention, with startups such as MediMusic, Endel and Biomedical Music Solutions using biometric data to personalize soundscapes that lower anxiety, pain and improve mobility. Major labels Warner, Sony and Universal have...
AI Body Composition Tool Predicts Future Health Risks
Researchers at University Medical Center Freiburg used an AI‑driven deep‑learning framework to analyze whole‑body MRI scans from 66,608 participants, creating the most detailed age‑, sex‑ and height‑adjusted body‑composition reference map to date. The study showed that skeletal‑muscle quality and visceral...
Why Contract Management Must Be the Engine for NHS Delivery
Emma James argues that contract management should be the engine driving NHS service delivery, not a post‑signing afterthought. The upcoming 2026/27 payment reforms will tie funding to measurable outcomes, making proactive oversight essential. She highlights the current disconnect between procurement...
NHS to Roll Out ‘1-Minute’ Immunotherapy Jab to Tens of Thousands with Cancer
The NHS is introducing a sub‑cutaneous form of pembrolizumab (Keytruda) that can be administered in just one minute, replacing the traditional two‑hour IV infusion. The rapid jab is approved for 14 cancer types, including lung, breast, head‑and‑neck, and cervical cancers,...
€4.8m EU-Funded AI Project to Tackle Child Diarrhoeal Disease in Africa
An EU‑funded CARE‑AFRICA project will develop an AI‑driven tablet tool to identify the pathogen behind diarrhoeal disease in children under five across sub‑Saharan Africa. The €4.8 million (about $5.2 million) grant brings together six partners from Europe and Africa to train models...
Moving From Reactive to Preventative: The Tech-Led Healthcare Revolution
Wearable health tech has moved from niche gadgets to a global preventive‑care platform, with more than 500 million smartwatch users in 2026 tracking metrics such as heart rate, sleep quality, stress and blood oxygen. The rise of AI‑powered assistants like Claude...
Alesi Surgical Secures £7m to Tackle Hazardous Surgical Smoke in Operating Theatres, Led by IW Capital
Alesi Surgical announced a £7 million (≈ $9 million) funding round led by IW Capital, aimed at scaling its FDA‑approved Ultravision2 smoke‑management platform worldwide. The technology uses electrostatic precipitation to eliminate surgical smoke up to 225‑times faster than conventional suction, improving visibility and...
Sleep Cycle App Now Available in ChatGPT in Sleep Category First
Sleep Cycle has become the first sleep‑category app available through OpenAI’s ChatGPT, allowing its Sleep Aid audio sessions to play directly within the chat interface. The integration lets users who mention difficulty falling asleep receive guided relaxation, soundscapes, and narrated...
AssureCare and Pillr Health Partner to Help Health Systems Tackle Specialty Pharmacy Costs
AssureCare and Pillr Health announced a strategic partnership to embed AssureCare's Akumen analytics platform into Pillr Health's Pharmacy Accelerator solution. The integration gives hospitals real‑time data and AI‑driven predictive modeling to manage specialty pharmacy costs, which are expected to exceed...
“Technology Needs to Enable Neighbourhood Working, Not Constrain It”
Neighbourhood care aims to integrate acute, primary, community and mental health services, but digital interoperability gaps hinder its rollout. Clinicians face duplicate data entry because systems across organisations don’t share updates. Harris Health Alliance is piloting the conneQT Toolbar, an...
Winning over Medtech Investors in the Age of AI
MedTech founders are feeling squeezed by AI hype, which dominates investor dialogue. Dr. Anne Blackwood argues that investors actually value clear clinical evidence, market need, and experienced teams more than flashy AI claims. She outlines five practical steps—lead with the...
Hospital Patients Can Now View Appointments in NHS App
Hospital patients at every acute NHS trust in England can now view, reschedule or cancel referrals and appointments through the NHS App, covering about 64% of all hospital bookings. The rollout adds to the 41 million registered users, with 15 million logins...
AI Documentation Tool Transforms Adult and Children’s Social Care
System C is rolling out its AI‑driven FormFlow Assistant to 15 English local authority social‑care teams, automating real‑time documentation during assessments. Early data show documentation time halved, with a 68% efficiency gain in the paperwork stage and a 40% overall...
TriFetch Comes Out of Stealth to Automate the Administrative Work that Slows Specialty Clinics
TriFetch announced a $1.9 million pre‑seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners to commercialize its AI‑driven automation platform for independent specialty clinics. The solution automates patient calls, referral routing, and prior‑authorization workflows, integrating directly with existing clinic systems without requiring EHR...
G2 Speech Achieves Self-Certified Supplier Status on NHS England AVT Registry
G2 Speech has been accepted as a self‑certified supplier on the NHS England Ambient Voice Technology (AVT) Registry. The designation confirms that its SpeechAmbient platform meets NHS safety, data‑security and performance standards. By joining the registry, G2 Speech can more...
British Business Bank Commits £100m to Health Tech Investment Fund
The British Business Bank has pledged £100 million (about $127 million) to the Apposite Healthcare Growth I fund, its largest commitment to date. The fund will back UK health‑tech firms across medical products, diagnostics, digital health and pharma‑outsourcing services. By writing a...
Bristol NHS Group Opens Doors to Tech Providers to Inspire Staff, in Flagship Elevate Showcase
Bristol NHS Group is hosting the Elevate Local Health Tech Showcase on 13 May, inviting health‑social care staff from its two trusts and the wider integrated care system to meet technology suppliers. The event, part of the group’s new digital strategy...
AI Chatbots Recommending Chemo Alternatives, Study Warns
A study by the Lundquist Institute evaluated major AI chatbots—including Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta AI and DeepSeek—on cancer‑treatment queries. Experts rated almost half of the responses as problematic, with 30% deemed somewhat inaccurate and 19.6% highly misleading. The bots often...
NIPT in 2026: How AI and Next-Gen Sequencing Are Changing Prenatal Screening
Non‑invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) in the UK is being reshaped by next‑generation sequencing and artificial‑intelligence algorithms. AI‑driven analysis lifts the positive predictive value for trisomies to roughly 88%, while proprietary enrichment steps like Focus Plus increase fetal DNA fractions 3.6‑fold, slashing...
Patients Stay Cancer-Free Three Years After Clinical Trial
A phase II trial at UCL tested pembrolizumab as neoadjuvant therapy for 32 patients with stage II‑III MMR‑deficient/MSI‑high bowel cancer. After up to nine weeks of immunotherapy before surgery, 59% showed no detectable tumor and none experienced recurrence over a median...
AI Restores Voice by Reading Neck Muscle Movements
Researchers at Pohang University of Science and Technology have created an AI‑driven neck sensor that reads microscopic muscle and skin movements to convert silent speech into audible voice. The device combines a miniature camera with silicone markers in a multiaxial...
NHS Patients Denied Robot-Assisted Surgery Based on Postcode, Study Reveals
A new study using Freedom of Information requests shows NHS patients in England face a postcode lottery for robot‑assisted surgery. London’s NHS trusts operate 28 surgical robots while the South West has only six, reflecting wildly different local funding approaches....
Brainjo Secures €2m in Seed Funding for VR Mental Health Tech
German startup brainjo announced a €2 million (≈$2.2 million) seed round to develop its first virtual‑reality Digital Health Application (DiGA). The VR‑based tool is designed as a prescribable adjunct for children with ADHD, allowing at‑home use alongside traditional psychotherapy. Funding was led...
AssureCare CEO on the AI-Powered Platform Unifying Patient Engagement Across Healthcare
AssureCare has launched Aktivate, an AI‑powered patient engagement platform that unifies data, communication channels, and decision‑making across providers, payors, pharmacies, and care teams. The platform orchestrates outreach, using real‑time insights to deliver the right message at the right time and...
Signature Clinic Announces Senior Leadership Appointments to Support Continued UK Growth
Signature Clinic, the UK’s largest cosmetic surgery provider, announced three senior hires—Mabroor Bhatty as Clinical Director, Tracey McAleney as Chief Operating Officer, and Sarah Hill as Head of Sales—to underpin its national expansion across England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The...
Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust Becomes First Trust to Sign up to System C’s Ambient AI Consultations
Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust has become the first NHS organisation to sign a contract with System C to deploy its CareFlow Ambient AI Outpatient Consultations module, slated to go live in summer 2026. The AI‑driven solution will embed real‑time transcription,...
Resilience by Design: Building a National Network for Ambulance Services
The Ambulance Radio Programme (ARP) has built a national, dual‑data‑centre network that links 35 NHS trust sites, ensuring 24/7 availability of mission‑critical ambulance communications. Partnering with Vysiion, ARP introduced a dedicated Network Operations Centre and managed services to monitor, patch,...
38 Days Faster: How Two NHS Trusts Rewired Patient Flow Across a Region
Two NHS trusts—Kettering General Hospital and University Hospitals of Northamptonshire—implemented a Federated Data Platform that provides real‑time visibility of patient demand and capacity across organisational boundaries. The shared patient tracking lists enabled the transfer of 1,435 patients, cutting average treatment...
Briya Hits 120m Patient Journeys Milestone
Briya announced its global data network now spans over 120 million patient journeys, integrating records from the United States, European Union, Latin America, the United Kingdom, Asia and the Middle East. The expansion adds 3 million UK longitudinal records and broadens its...
StuffThatWorks Launches Research Fellows Programme
StuffThatWorks has launched a Research Fellows Program that grants ten non‑profit researchers unrestricted, free access to its massive patient‑reported real‑world dataset, which contains over 1.3 billion data points across 1,250 conditions. The program supplies SNOMED‑compatible, IRB‑approved data, built‑in analytics tools, and...
Watch: AI and Preventative Health Webinar
Health Tech World and Femtech World hosted a webinar featuring four industry leaders discussing how artificial intelligence is transforming preventative health. The panel covered AI‑driven early disease detection, personalized lifestyle recommendations, and the specific implications for women’s health innovation. Recorded...
24/7 GP Appointment Booking Is Now Live in the NHS App for More than One Million Patients
Rapid Health’s AI‑powered Smart Triage is now embedded in the NHS App, giving more than one million English patients 24‑hour, seven‑day access to GP appointments. The integration presents each user with an average of 61 available slots, with most selections...
The Real Threat to NHS Data Isn’t Technology: It’s Misinformation that Undermines Performance and Productivity
The article argues that misinformation, not technology, is the biggest threat to NHS data effectiveness. It explains that the NHS owns its data and that external vendors act only as processors under strict contracts. Misleading narratives about data ownership are...
The Next Frontier in Precision Oncology
Precision oncology is shifting from static, single‑biopsy analyses toward dynamic, multi‑omics platforms that integrate genomics, proteomics, spatial biology and longitudinal clinical data. Over the next decade, AI will move from pattern‑recognition to causal reasoning, offering clinicians interpretable predictions that anticipate...
Digital Tool Aims to Promote Later-Life Bladder Health
Researchers from the University of Manchester, Lithuanian Sports University and the University of Vic have launched KOKU Bladder, a digital platform that blends evidence‑based education, pelvic‑floor muscle training, behavior‑change techniques and gamification to support bladder health in adults 50+. The...
Lessons From HIMSS: AI Will Not Fix Healthcare: Informed Leadership Might
At HIMSS 2026, industry leaders acknowledged that AI is no longer a future possibility but a present reality in healthcare, with over 1,200 AI‑enabled medical devices already in use in the United States. However, the rapid pace of adoption has...
UK Cancer Trial Targets Difficult-to-Treat Tumours in Children
A new CAR T‑cell immunotherapy trial, called Mighty, will enroll up to 60 children and young adults with hard‑to‑treat solid tumours in the UK and US. The study targets rhabdomyosarcoma, Ewing sarcoma and soft‑tissue sarcoma, cancers that behave differently from...
Why the New NHS Financial Year Must Fund Stability Today and Digital Maturity for Tomorrow
The NHS’s 2026/27 budget must adopt a dual‑track strategy that safeguards core clinical services while ring‑fencing funds for digital transformation. Richard Oswald of Exponential‑e argues that electronic records, interoperable platforms and secure infrastructure are no longer optional but essential for...