New breakthroughs in healthcare - Our takeaways from the Wired Health Conference 2025

On 18 March 2025, Bristows attended the Wired Health 2025 conference, which took place at Kings Place in London. It was a day gathering medical professionals, health technologists, pharma leaders, and entrepreneurs who spoke about their projects and inspirational stories. A highlight of the day was the start-up pitch competition, showcasing lots of innovative tech products in the healthcare space.

Here are a few of our takeaways from the conference:

• Reliable high-quality data sets are key for AI technology. Some of the speakers argued that soon every piece of technology will have elements of AI (if not be entirely AI-driven). It is no longer a surprise that AI is leading the current technological revolution, having a significant impact in many fields, such as automation, agriculture, food delivery and, of course, healthcare. However, in order to use AI efficiently, the model has to be trained with high-quality, reliable data. On this point, it was argued that there is, for example, immense data generated by hospitals in the UK, which can be highly beneficial for training AI models in the sector. However, a great part of this data still remains unused, resulting in inefficiency and increasing costs. Training AI models on medical data could, for example, improve pattern recognition features of healthcare devices. Although there are already reliable data sets available for companies and start-ups in this field (e.g., from NHS hospitals), there are still inefficiencies in the ways the data is collected and aggregated, as well as in the channels of distribution, which should be improved and simplified. 
   
• Health records in the UK. Unlike other countries, the UK has a national healthcare system where every patient in the UK is given an NHS number which serves as a unique identifier. Moreover, most UK patient records are digitised, which presents a major opportunity to centralise health data across the UK. Health records include important information such as diagnoses, medications, treatments, and test results that patients have received during their lives. Storing health data locally or regionally can lead to data loss when people relocate, make portability more difficult, or result in fragmented care. Instead, with centralised records, following the progress of patients in clinical trials and encouraging collaboration between biotech and pharma companies might become simpler. The benefits of the existing UK Biobank, which holds data collected from altruistic volunteers over the past 20 years, have already been seen, with vast amounts of research being published based on this data already. Therefore, the UK might want to leverage its centralised public health system to, more broadly, create a single, unified, central database for health data. In the past, there have been convincing privacy concerns with this approach given the potential for misuse of data and doubts over security of storage. However, it will likely be the effects of usage of the NHS Federated Data Platform (software used by NHS organisations in England to share operational data relevant to patient care) that will influence the next decisions by the government on centralising data. Moreover, a similar trend can be seen at EU level as the European Health Data Space Regulation (EHDS) entered into force on 26 March 2025. This does not affect national healthcare systems and data will continue to be stored and processed digitally within each EU country. Instead, the EHDS aims to establish a common framework for the use and easy exchange of electronic health data across the EU by: (i) enabling individuals to access, control and share their health data across the EU; and (ii) boosting research and innovation by simplifying safe access to health data across borders by health professionals.
   
• Diversity and health. A recurring theme throughout the day was health equity. It has been established that income levels, race and gender have an intrinsic link to our health. The data shows that lower socioeconomic status is linked to poorer health outcomes, while higher income and status are associated with better health conditions and longer life expectancy. It was disheartening to see how this impacts people later in their life, particularly where they are both of a lower socioeconomic status and from an ethnic minority background. However, it was encouraging to hear about the steps being taken to address these issues, for example, through the Institute of Health Equity working directly with local authorities to address the data specific to their area. Additionally, the importance of linked factors – such as child poverty, education and racial bias – should not be taken lightly when considering improving healthcare outcomes. 
   
• Start-up excitement. There were a lot of fantastic start-up businesses breaking barriers with the latest technology to improve health. The winner of the start-up pitch competition was Phare Bio, a company that is using generative AI to build 15 novel antibiotics, to combat against the urgent threat of antimicrobial resistance. We heard about how the model is being trained, and the potential for these antibiotics to outpace antimicrobial resistance. It was notable that Phare Bio currently operates solely from philanthropic funding and donations and plans to do so until it reaches clinical trial stage. They mentioned that this approach solves some of the issues related to funding priorities by investors in early stage development. We understand this to be a particular problem for antibiotic development, which produces limited returns for investors in comparison to other drugs. Several other start-ups also discussed the wider impacts beyond their technology, such as distribution, the appearance of physical products, how to target users, and the long-term effects of their technology on society. It was clear, though, that every start-up had an exciting idea that was reaching fruition, and we will surely hear more about the ground-breaking changes these businesses will bring to healthcare in the near future.