18th Medical Innovations Summit

Rotimi Fadiya is a winner of the International James Dyson Award. Along with the three other Canadian biomedical and electrical engineering students, Rotimi invented 'sKan', a low-cost handheld sensor that could allow faster diagnosis of skin cancers. Dr Francisco J Gonzalez is a scientist and chief of research & development for a Mexican company, Higia. Dr Gonzalez and his colleagues are working on 'EVA' a wearable device capable of early stage breast cancer detection.

Listed by Forbes magazines in their recent '30 Under 30' list, Chris Edson is the co-founder and CEO of OurPath, a digital health company which brings together doctors, scientists, engineers, technologists and product designers in order to reimagine preventative healthcare. Currently OurPath is having quite the impact on the National Diabetes Prevention Programme, one of the key national initiatives seeking to tackle the £ 10 billion spent by the NHS on diabetes. OurPath uses 'smart' weighing scales via 3G to a smartphone app, a handbook, recipe book and activity tracker, allowing diabetics to take control of their own condition.

A pioneering therapy aimed at lowering anxiety by tuning into your own heartbeat is being put to the test in the first clinical trial of its kind. The treatment, known as interoception-directed therapy, is being tested in 120 autistic people, for whom anxiety of a common problem. The trail follows a decade's research by Professor Sarah Garfinkel, a psychologist at the University of Sussex, into the intriguing ways that interactions between the heart and the brain influence emotions and behaviour. The latest work, funded by mental health charity MQ:Transforming Mental Health, aims to turn these insights into a therapy.

Nutritank is a national, student-led organisation which aims to promote the need for greater nutrition and lifestyle education in medical schools' curricula and in other settings. Nutritank's vision is that this education will equip future doctors and healthcare professionals with the knowledge needed to help reverse the current surge of chronic disease. Iain Broadley and Ally Jaffee will be making a presentation about the origins and expansion of their initiative, and will be joined by Dr Rupy Aujla who will be speaking about his  pioneering Culinary Medicine course for medical students, which was piloted at Bristol Medical School. Nutritank was recently featured on a Jamie Oliver programme on Channel 4.

10 million worldwide require surgery to prevent corneal disease and almost 5 million people suffer total blindness due to corneal scarring. In a world first, a team at Newcastle University, led by Professor Che Connon, have created a 3D transplantable engineered cornea, based on using a 3D printer with functional tissue and live cells. This technique could be used in the future to ensure an unlimited supply of corneas.

Dr Ahmed is a Laparoscopic Colorectal Surgeon at The Royal London and St Bartholomew’s Hospitals. He is a dedicated trainer, educator and Associate Dean of Bart’s Medical School. Previous attendees of our summits will recall Dr Ahmed’s presentation about removing a tumour from the liver and bowel of a patient in what was the first operation streamed live online using Google Glass, watched in more than 100 countries. In 2016 he performed an operation on a British cancer patient using virtual reality technology, which reached over 4.5 million people on Twitter. His next project is leading the first ever fully digital hospital in Bolivia

The Christie Hospital in Manchester is the first in the NHS to offer pioneering proton-beam therapy. The lack of proton therapy in the UK became the subject of public debate in 2014, when the parents of Ashya King, then aged five, travelled to Prague to receive proton therapy there. He has since been cleared of cancer.  Dr Whitfield is a consultant clinical oncologist, treating adults with Central Nervous System (CNS) or brain and spinal tumours, and one of three clinical oncologists treating children with CNS tumours. A second proton-beam therapy clinic will open at UCLH in 2020. The two clinics received £250 million of Government money.

Healios is a leading digital healthcare technology company, working to empower patients and families affected by mental and physical illnesses. Rich Andrews and Dr Lars Hansen will talk about the progress Healios has made and the clinical trials for 'ThinkNinja', the 'world's most advanced mental health app designed for young people.' The app is designed to help young people with their mental health, emotional well-being and resilience, and supports symptoms of anxiety of low mood, and the trial will involve over 5,000 school children across seven countries in Europe

Described as the 'Google for Clinical Trials', FindMeCure provides an online platform allowing every person struggling with a medical condition to access treatments in development." To date FindMeCure has helped over 120,000 people globally, connected over 2000 patients to clinical trials and listed over 61,000 open clinical trials. Maya Zlatanova is their CEO and a Co-Founder.

The Helix Centre is a healthcare innovation studio, embedded inside St Mary’s Hospital in London. Established in 2014 as a collaboration between Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art, the Centre brings together a team of designers, technologists and clinicians tackling some of the most pressing challenges in healthcare. Ivor Williams is Senior Design Associate at the 'Centre. He is developing new ways of thinking about and experiencing death and dying in the 21st century. He leads the end-of-life care projects, is creating a more human-centred design system of hospice care at St Mary's Hospital and has progressed two initiatives 'ReSPECT' and 'Amber Care Plans'.

Duchenne UK is at the forefront of a new wave of collaborative programmes bringing together rival drug firms to tackle some of the toughest challenges in medicine. The charity has achieved a rare thing in the pharmaceutical world - it has got eight competitor companies to work together. Their HERCULES project brings together drugmakers to pool data and resources to try to speed up getting effective medicines to Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) patients. Duchenne UK has raised £10 million in 5 years with funds going towards academic research, clinical trials and drug development. Fleur Chandler is a Health Economist at GlaxoSmithKline, 'DMD mum' and inventor of Project HERCULES. She will co-present with Josie Godfrey who is a former Associate Director at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).

In recent years the NHS has made a considerable effort to promote innovation and a few years ago, Professor Tony Young, a RSM member, launched NHS England's Clinical Entrepreneur Programme in 2016.  One of the Fellows of the programme is Dr Krishan Ramdoo who is a Research Registrar in Ear, Nose and Throat Surgery at UCL. He is also the Founder and CEO of CEEK Health whose focus is screening for hearing loss and detection at an early stage. This is a critically important area as over 5% of the world's population - 466 million people - has disabling hearing loss. By 2050 it is estimated this will grow to over 900 million people ( one in every ten people).

Oxford Heartbeat is a start-up company which is developing medical device software that makes planning for surgeries simpler, faster and more accurate. It enables surgeons to unlock and visualise crucial information in preparation for surgery, to see what is happening inside blood vessels, travel through tissues and bones and provides unprecedented visibility for keyhole surgeries. Their innovation combines the power of predictive computations, big data and AI. Dr Katerina Spranger is the founder and CEO of the company, and is an Enterprise Fellow at the Royal Academy of Engineering. Dr Liya Asner is the R&D Lead and previously worked for 5 years as a researcher in cardiac biomechanics and data-driven modelling at St Thomas’ Hospital. Their company has received numerous awards for their innovative technology, including the NHS Innovation Award 2017 from Health Education England and WIRED “Best Healthcare Startup (2018)"