interviews

Future Health Mission 2012

Twenty of the UK’s most promising early stage health technology businesses have recently returned from the ‘Future Health Mission 2012’, an entrepreneur-led trade mission to Boston in the USA aimed at getting a foothold in that country’s massive market and spurring growth back home. NHE talks to Zahid Latif, head of healthcare at the Technology Strategy Board, which helps put on the event each year.

Innovations in healthcare technology can create major benefits for patients, and allow NHS and private health organisations to improve clinical services and do things differently. But in our system, getting ideas from the initial eureka moment to the market requires a huge amount of work.

To give some of the most promising start-up health businesses a kickstart, every year a group of agencies and companies including the Technology Strategy Board and UK Trade & Investment take 20 UK firms to the USA as part of the Future Health Mission. There, they make connections with investors and partners, get advice on product development and entering the US market, and this year they attended the global AdvaMed conference.

‘Alumni’ of past years have collectively raised over $200m in private finance for their innovations.

Zahid Latif, head of healthcare at the Technology Strategy Board, told NHE: “We try to get them to think about the international opportunities; not just in selling technology, but also developing partnerships with potential collaborators, customers or other partners. The mission to Boston is an innovation mission. It lets UK companies go round one of the leading life sciences innovation hubs in the world, and to experience what it’s like to meet other innovators and entrepreneurs, and what the international opportunities are for their businesses.”

This year there were 120 entries from entrepreneurs and companies wanting to take part in the mission, with the 20 best judged against a number of criteria.

Latif said: “We were looking at the level of innovation associated with the technology, but also whether the companies had a reasonable appreciation of what market they were going into.

“One of the criticisms is that companies tend to develop technologies in isolation and they don’t think what their market opportunities are, and how they’re going to go about taking their products or services forward. Also important is what stage they are at with regards to their growth potential.

“I tend to describe these companies as being at the bottom end of the hockey stick: they have a disruptive potential solution, and they’ve developed the technologies for a couple of years – many of them have had funding to develop the proof of concepts or the prototypes – and they’re now at the stage where they need to think about commercialising it in the next two to three years. It was a difficult challenge [to judge between the entries] because we’re not short of good ideas. I think it’s the marriage between good ideas and commercialisation potential that we’re really interested in.”

The organisers have been tracking the progress of all 112 companies that have taken part in past missions before this year.

He said: “The previous Future Health Mission went out to San Francisco and some of the success stories there were companies like Michelson Diagnostics, who developed a diagnostics tool to screen skin cancer patients, and they were able to use the mission to identify key opinion leaders in the US and have started rolling out those diagnostic tests in the US into the key opinion leaders’ clinical units.

“We’ve also had companies like Cambridge Temperature Concepts, who’ve got a device to help couples have children, Duo Fertility. They got FDA approval for their device and started selling in the US in April 2012, and they’re looking to take that forward with a big launch fairly soon.

“A lot of the companies have used the opportunities from the mission to build their connections and contact list, so they can prepare their businesses and think about how they’re going to take them forward. It’s not about one-hit-wonders.”

But the TSB and UKTI are ultimately about UK growth and innovation, so they want companies they help to be successful abroad, but to grow in the UK.

We asked Latif how much of a problem that was, and said: “Many of them are interested in growing their businesses and growing them overseas. What we try to avoid is companies who are just trying to sell their companies to the highest bidder, because from our perspective we’re looking at how you get sustainable business growth here in the UK.

“Part of that is recognising what people’s strategic intent is, with regards to coming on the mission, and we’re really interested in the companies that are saying ‘we have an idea, we’ve developed it, and we’d like explore new areas and new market opportunities to take that technology forward’.”

It’s a competitive environment, he noted – the US regulatory system can be tough for new entrants to get through because of a big backlog, he said, making Europe and the UK more attractive markets for some businesses.

We asked Latif for his view on NHS organisations’ willingness to accept innovative products and technologies at the moment – whether the spending squeeze is detracting from such investment, or encouraging it.

He said: “The changes in the NHS could be viewed in two ways: a challenge, or an opportunity. Because of the drive to deliver more effi cient and more effective healthcare, it means people who can develop a technology and demonstrate how it can lead to benefi ts in the health system are the ones who are going to be really successful and really unpack some of these opportunities.”