Is it worth investing in #HealthTech in 2021?
Biowar: #coronavirus = World War III
"Science cannot predict the future of the human being"
Digital health technology in 2021 is probably going to be a different market than it was going into 2020, if for no other reason than increased salience. There’s nothing quite like being secluded for a year by a deadly disease, with extra time to contemplate mortality, to make you interested in a wristwatch that tells you if your heart is working as expected. So I found Koenig’s and Rohrbaugh’s predictions of steady growth in end-user monitoring technology to be surprisingly pessimistic, with 34% growth in 2021 dropping to 14% in subsequent years. That said, it’s unclear whether these figures include multifunction technologies with health adjuncts, such as an Apple Watch, or if they include only devices that might be prescribed or suggested by a physician.
For the third consecutive year, 2020 was the year of Healthcare IPOs. Here is my analysis (short report):
While there were few massive IPOs in 2020, mostly in the Financial, Consumer Services, and Tech industries (e.g., Rocket, AirBnb, Lufax, Snowflake, and DoorDash), at least 101 Healthcare companies went public last year, constituting about 48% of all IPOs in all industries (Figure 1).
For the third consecutive year, the best performing IPOs were in the Healthcare industry. The average return of all healthcare companies, which went public in 2020, was 96% (followed by Technology [71%] and Consumer Services [65%], respectively (Figure 2)). Eight out of the top 10 IPO performers were Healthcare companies (and 1 Consumer Services and 1 Financials).
The total market cap of all companies that went public in 2020 in all industries was around $1.1 trillion at the end of the calendar year. While the total market cap of all Healthcare companies that had an IPO in 2020 was about $242 billion, as expected, the first place went to the Tech industry with an overall $328 billion market cap
The most important innovation of the year, by a mile, wasn’t really “technology” in the conventional, Silicon Valley sense of the word. But make no mistake: The scientists at Pfizer, Moderna, BioNTech, the National Institutes of Health, and other pharmaceutical companies and research labs whose work led to the first approved Covid-19 vaccines are innovators of the highest order, and they probably did more to alleviate human suffering this year than all the app developers and hardware makers in the world combined.
These scientists — and the teams that supported them — worked under enormous pressure and crushing deadlines to develop a new kind of mRNA vaccine for the coronavirus, guide it through clinical trials and get it out to the public in record time. The vaccines are a true triumph of science, and because of these people’s hard work, hundreds of millions of Americans will get to spend some or most of 2021 hugging their relatives, reopening their businesses, traveling safely and doing all of the socially un-distant things that give us meaning and joy.
Rohrbaugh talked about using robots for incoming emergency room triage interviews or resulting telemedicine, and I think that might be one step too far for most people for a few more years.
It’s also likely going to be divided by sector. It’s one thing to have your online shopping delivered by a drone when that has a direct benefit to you, and it’s quite another when robots are performing security tasks. I think we’ll need many stories about robots saving lives to overcome the image of robots causing injury or death in a thousand movies.
Rohrbaugh then focused on “digital therapeutics,” a category of hardware and apps that collect data and provide users with activities and strategies to manage illnesses or symptoms in real time. This field also includes connected gadgets that feed this data back to the user’s physician to adjust treatment and prescriptions for individualized care. She cited examples such as exercise programs for people with diabetes and virtual reality environments to aid in recovery from PTSD. If this category is new to you, expect to hear about it again: digital therapeutics are expected to be an $11.7 billion business by 2027.
Consumers realised the value of sleep more than ever in 2020, as stress and anxiety brought on by the pandemic caused sleep patterns and healthy bedtime routines to suffer. Searches for ‘sleep yoga’ increased by 90% in 2020, suggesting that people are keen to incorporate stress-busting, sleep-enhancing routines into their wellbeing rituals.For more, see Covid-19: The Beauty Sleep Opportunity, The Sensorial Beauty Momentand The Brief.
With 2020 placing a significant focus on wellbeing, bathing rituals will boom as consumer searches for ‘spiritual cleansing bath’ rocketed by 180% in 2020. Covid-19 has drastically altered consumer approaches to beauty routines, inspiring new at-home rituals and self-care experiences. Brands can market essential oils and beauty treatments to help them embrace bath-time rituals.
See Modernising Ancient Beauty Rituals and Cosmetics in the Wake of Covid-19 for further insights.
One of the goals of the scheme is to provide a better range of preventative healthcare solutions for Germans which will make people healthier and reduce medical costs long term.
“The argument is that the positive effect of prescribing digital apps is that fewer patients will be seeking physical healthcare. The overall expenditure for the healthcare system will then drop,” says Filip Dames, the founding partner of the Berlin-based venture capital firm Cherry Ventures.
But Germany is pretty much alone in reimbursing the cost of digital health apps and its startup-friendly health minister Jens Spahn hopes that Germany can also become a European leader in the digital healthcare transformation.
Venture capitalists and startups in Germany believe that the new rules will benefit the startup ecosystem and allow healthtech startups to get enough of a critical mass to take their products global.
Eckhardt Weber, managing partner at the newly formed Berlin-based healthtech venture capital firm Heal Capital, says it is a launch platform for companies aiming high.
“From an investor point of view, if someone with a good digital therapeutic product can enter the German market, access it and then to a certain degree scale in it, then he or she can generate all the data needed to also get the funding to go abroad to the UK market and even to the US,” Weber says.
Instrumental in the founding of Compass Pathways and chairman of Atai Life Sciences, Christian Angermayer has been leading a global psychedelic renaissance.
In September, the company he helped found in 2017, Compass Pathways, which has developed a synthetic version of psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) and is conducting the world’s first large-scale therapy clinical trial using the drug, listed in New York. His 28% stake, which cost him around $55m over multiple rounds, became worth more than $400m.
Next spring the biotech company he founded Atai Life Sciences — which is pursuing a large range of treatments for mental-health disorders using other more obscure drugs such as DMT, ar-ketamine and ibogaine — is set to go public as well at an expected $1bn-$2bn valuation, according to bankers familiar with the process.
With these high-profile exits and an increasingly large fortune — his investment company, Apeiron Investment Group, manages around $750m of his own money and $600m of others’ and invests in longevity research, biotech, fintech, spacetech, crypto and entertainment — Angermayer is becoming one of Europe’s most powerful and influential tech investors.
A modern take on mysticism and magic will enter the mainstream in 2021 with alternative spirituality taking hold, as searches for ‘protection crystals’ saw a 100% increase in 2020. Personal care routines are increasingly being positioned as rituals, and brands can offer positive mindset concepts from the world of wellness. The pandemic has forced consumers to re-evaluate their safety and wellbeing, leading to a dramatic rise in self-care rituals.
For more, see New Ways with New-Age Beauty and 10 Nail Trends to Watch.
If 2020 was the year when video consultations with doctors finally became a generalized reality, 2021 is gearing up to be the year of data sharing between patients and their doctors.
There’s increasing demand from practitioners and patients for ways to easily monitor their health at a distance in between appointments.
French startup Withings, which makes connected everythings from smart watches that measure your heart rate to blood pressure monitors, raised money recently to pursue just that.
The coronavirus has helped attract interest of course, but it’s not just that. In the US, regulatory changes are also acting as accelerators: insurance companies are subsidising doctors to do more patient tracking using connected devices from scales to blood pressure and sleep monitors.
Chronic diseases in particular, like diabetes, high blood pressure and sleep apnea, call for this kind of monitoring. They’re typically conditions that both patients and doctors need to keep an eye on, although booking frequent appointments just to check in if nothing is wrong doesn’t necessarily make sense.
Remote monitoring is the second category behind teleconsultations on CB Insights’ annual ranking of the 150 most promising digital health startups in the world.
Avant la pandémie, 615 millions de personnes souffraient déjà de dépression ou d'anxiété dans le monde et 70 % n'étaient pas soignées. Il est trop tôt pour dresser un premier bilan mais la situation a sûrement encore été aggravée.
La dépression à elle seule coûterait $1000 milliards/an en perte de productivité. En France, les troubles mentaux représentent le premier poste de dépenses de l’assurance maladie soit quasiment €20Mds/an.
Il faut inventer des solutions moins chères et plus accessibles pour le grand public. Les services de téléconsultation comme TalkSpace (USA, $106.7M levés) ont le vent en poupe.
En France, sur Doctolib, le nombre de psychologues proposant la visio a été multiplié par 45 entre janvier 2020 et mars 2020 (ils étaient 2900 fin mars).
Une autre manière d'améliorer la prise en charge est de mieux segmenter les traitements en s'adressant à des communautés ou groupes aux besoins spécifiques. Les traitements spécialisés pour les hommes semblent être un segment porteur (le groupe Reddit r/maleMentalHealth a plus de 26K membres).
On pourrait aussi penser à des services dédiés aux entrepreneurs, aux jeunes parents...
Enfin, les solutions permettant d'exprimer son mal être sont en train d'émerger. Notamment grâce aux vêtements : c'est ce qu'on appelle le mental wear (lire notre signal faible à ce sujet), porter son malaise avec des messages affichés pour dédramatiser les troubles mentaux.
Madhappy (USA, $1,8M levés) propose ce genre de messages sur ces collections, LVMH y a même investi en 2019 aux côtés de Tommy Hilfiger. Il y a aussi Willys ou Richer Poorer dont le slogan est confidence in confort.
In other areas, though, it’s clear that disruption was thorough: CTA says spending on digital fitness increased by a third as people stayed away from gyms, nearly the entire legal system figured out how to proceed using remote communications platforms, and as mentioned earlier, the same thing blindsided the educational system and caused massive change. Interestingly, CTA didn’t attach profitability numbers in the presentation to the legal or educational segments—perhaps because few audience members would see that as a positive development compared to the pain they’ve personally experienced?
Fitness is a shoe-in to cash-in, with Lululemon’s $500m acquisition of MIRROR (live-stream screen tech that can ‘turn any space into a personal fitness studio’) proof of the direction. It’s yet to confirm how it’ll be deployed beyond “strengthening our community, loyalty and our relationship with our guests and memberships” (chief executive Calvin McDonald) but super gym Equinox offers one likely template: instructors on its members-only fitness app wear clothing from its store, tagged with e-commerce links for post-class shopping.
This was another very common response. Many people who weren’t previously into fitness have been getting into running, yoga, and other activities as a way to cope with lockdown. And they’ve been astounded at how much daily exercise can improve life.
“Desperate for any excuse to leave the house, I’ve finally been able to keep up a daily exercise routine. It’s incredible how much difference even a short jog every morning makes!” Katie Reynolds, a Vox reader in the US, told me. “My sleep is better, my brain feels clearer, my mood is improved, and it feels easier to keep up other good habits. Definitely will be keeping this habit, at least until there’s ice on the ground again.”
Daye is a London-based startup that is trying to help women suffering from period pain. Founded in 2018, the startup’s first product is a newly developed tampon that uses CBD to help tackle period cramps (or dysmenorrhea) as an alternative to traditional painkillers. (New to our 2020 list)
Gynica is an Israeli startup using what it says is a clinically-proven, cannabinoid-based solution for gynaecological treatments, such as Endometriosis. Founded in 2017, it still has a lot to prove but is in an exciting new area of femtech. (New to our 2020 list)
Hyperpigmentation Treatment - Hyperpigmentation results in flat, darkened patches of skin that can vary in size and colour. Treatment has been steadily increasing in search interest over the past 5 years. Sun exposure and UV rays as well as skin ageing are usually a big factor in dark spots.
Across the last several years, employers have offered new benefits to support their employees, for instance, expanded parental leave. Even before the pandemic, Gartner research revealed that 45% of well-being budget increases were being allocated to mental and emotional well-being programs. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought well-being to the forefront as employers are more aware than ever how of the impact of mental health on employees and by association, the workplace.
By late March, 68% of organizations had introduced at least one new wellness benefit to aid employees during the pandemic. In 2021, employers will go even further by working to de-stigmatize mental health by expanding mental health benefits, creating days where they shut the entire company down for a day to offer “a collective mental health day” to build awareness across the workforce about this critical issue.
Some companies, like LVMH, have started incorporating wellbeing and mental health resources into their businesses, but insiders say not much has changed.
Little by little, some major players are adopting better wellness policies, if not across the board. For example, according to LVMH’s Social Responsibility Report for 2018, “most maisons [or brands] have a psychological support cell of some kind”.
Examples of initiatives implemented at the group’s 75 brands (though it doesn’t specify which ones) include: “Wellbeing and peace-of-mind training led by a relaxation therapist”, “prevention and wellbeing in the workplace training led by an ergonomics specialist or physical therapist”, and “monthly wellbeing lunch and learn workshops”.
Kering reports on its website that since 1 January this year, it provides 14 weeks paid leave for parents with newborns, worldwide. The company did not respond to requests on how it is further implementing wellness throughout the group.
A solution is to start afresh independently, with wellness as the company principle. There is a slew of young designers, as well as a few old school titans — think Alber Elbaz and Jean-Paul Gaultier — who have stepped off the whirring hamster wheel that is big luxury and adopted a kinder, gentler approach.
Managing your health has become a mantra for many. You are in control of your sleep, your vitamin deficiencies through blood tests and your weekly exercise, right?
If you have all those things in check, then you should check out the next bright thing – brain training. We aren’t speaking of sudoku or juggling but actually improving your brain through neurofeedback.
Neurofeedback is a therapeutic intervention that helps the brain to learn by giving it feedback. It works similarly to a computer game giving you points when you are winning. With a headband stuck on your head and your eyes locked on a screen, it actually assesses your brainwave activity.
Neurofeedback has been used to address problems of anxiety-depression, attention deficits, behavior disorders, sleep disorders, headaches and migraines, PMS and emotional disturbances. But who said it has to stop here?
Research has shown that people without known issues also can improve their brains by using the same technology. So, will the year of 2021 be the year we all become smarter, nicer and more focussed? No, but the trend of trying is definitely about to take off.
From a chip in your brain to a headset on your head — here are the European startups that are breaking the boundaries in neurotechnology.
The UK-based startup Proximie, which has developed an augmented reality tool to save lives by allowing senior surgeons to virtually climb into any operation theatre across the globe, has seen a 430% increase in surgeries this year.
Since being founded by the NHS surgeon Dr Nadine Hachach-Haram in 2016, the startup has managed to attract 2,500 users across 300 hospitals and has had its tool used in over 7,000 surgeries.
With the year of Covid coming to an end, the company is now looking to raise more capital to take its tool to more markets. “Undoubtedly Covid has accelerated behaviour change and accelerated the willingness to see this as a solution for the future,” says Hachach-Haram.
This is potentially a big market. There are about 330m operations happening every year and a large majority of the global population, 5bn people, lack access to safe surgery. The idea is that giving local surgeons the support from experts in another location could change the outcomes of many operations.
Genetic modification is a technique to change the characteristics of a plant, animal or micro-organism by transferring a piece of DNA from one organism to a different organism. This is done through targeted removal of the desired genes from the DNA of one organism and adding them to the other organism. This technique has for example been used to develop fungi and bacteria that produce medicines.
https://tidbits.com/2021/01/15/ces-2021-tech-trends-to-watch/
https://www.ajmc.com/view/addressing-health-insurance-consumer-behavior-in-2020-potential-trends-to-watch-in-2021
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiebaron/2021/01/04/from-silver-bullets-to-strategic-overhauls-9-retail-trends-tactics--innovations-for-success-in-2021-/?sh=7a927637d3bd&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT1RNNE5UTmxOV001TVRVMCIsInQiOiJwMk83SENOeDBcLzdZYWFpVW4zVUduUmRjQUZZeDUzVHVrR0RxNXhaRVRxV3JCU04xR0EwK0srVFBuTFFHamlCdDdXSmVZang3ZDJSVFJtck50VHcxSzBHSURLd1BFK1RIblNMRWRHdVgzTFY5WEtLakQzS3diaEZ3TEFYNXBxZHMifQ%3D%3D
https://sifted.eu/articles/european-startup-predictions/
https://www.stylus.com/pinterest-predicts-top-2021-beauty-trends?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=friday_news_and_views_Jan 08, 2021&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT1RNNE5UTmxOV001TVRVMCIsInQiOiJwMk83SENOeDBcLzdZYWFpVW4zVUduUmRjQUZZeDUzVHVrR0RxNXhaRVRxV3JCU04xR0EwK0srVFBuTFFHamlCdDdXSmVZang3ZDJSVFJtck50VHcxSzBHSURLd1BFK1RIblNMRWRHdVgzTFY5WEtLakQzS3diaEZ3TEFYNXBxZHMifQ%3D%3D
https://sifted.eu/articles/germanys-healthcare-apps/
https://www.voguebusiness.com/talent/articles/10-years-after-the-death-of-alexander-mcqueen-what-has-fashion-learned/