London Tech Week 2023

Mark Suzman
London Tech Week
June 13, 2023
AS PREPARED

Hello everyone! I’m honored to join you today, and to be a part of London Tech Week’s tenth anniversary convening. Thank you, Jack, for the kind introduction and for setting the stage for today’s conversation.

And thanks to all of you for coming. It’s an honor to address a group like this, and it's been energizing to hear about all the work you are doing to advance science, technology, and innovation and create a healthier and more sustainable future for everyone.

Progress, powered by innovation

Since you’re here at the health impact panel today, you're already well-aware of the critical importance of innovation for global health and well-being. Your work – the scientific discoveries and technological advances you help enable – could not be more important right now.

The world faces huge challenges. War, food insecurity, a climate emergency, economic uncertainty, continued health inequity across the world – all made worse by a global pandemic.

With only seven years to go, we are stalled – or even losing ground – on many of the Sustainable Development Goals: the shared blueprint for progress on poverty, health, gender equality, and many other goals that all the member countries of the United Nations committed to achieve by 2030. To jumpstart progress and get the world back on track, we need ambitious research, brilliant science, and transformative new innovations.

That’s why Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates created our foundation more than two decades ago: to leverage the power of science and innovation to tackle persistent problems in global health and development; and to help ensure that exciting new technologies that can save and improve lives have the widest possible reach. Our foundation currently has over $1 billion invested in the UK, much of it funding research and development projects designed to make a real impact around the world.

We know this model works because we have the data. Thanks to science and innovation, and the hard work of people getting these innovations to those who need them, there have been tremendous gains in global well-being over the last few decades. Child mortality has been cut in half since 1990. Global life expectancy increased by six years between 2000 and 2019. Polio cases have dropped 99.9% since 1988.

And look at what we saw with COVID. As horrifying as this virus proved to be, the development of safe and effective vaccines in just ten months – the fastest turnaround in history— saved 20 million lives in 2021. That’s thanks to unprecedented collaboration among scientists and researchers around the world, and to exciting innovations like the mRNA platform – a breakthrough now being deployed to fight many other diseases.

But especially given the scale of challenges we face, we need more exciting ideas and innovations to close gaps in global health and bring more opportunity to people all over the world.

And that’s where you come in. I’m sure many of you are already working on new technologies and applications that could have a tremendous impact for communities if brought to scale.

If you remember just one thing I share today, it’s this: I strongly encourage you to think about that impact globally – how what you’re working on could enhance the lives of not just consumers in well-off countries, but also make a powerful positive difference in the lives of children and families in communities with limited resources.

Seeing the transformative impact of new innovations on people’s lives is the best part of my job. So, I’d like to tell you about some of the technologies we’re supporting, and how they are changing and saving lives around the world in ways that might surprise you.

I also hope they inspire you to think about how your own projects could reach and help more people in need around the world.

Repurposing COVID-19 innovations

Let me start with our efforts to apply the innovations that arose from fighting COVID-19 to other diseases that continue to disproportionately afflict poor communities around the world.

As I said, COVID brought the use of mRNA vaccines into practice on a global scale and proved their potential. Scientists are now working to apply mRNA technology to find vaccines for HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and universal flu, among others.

Similarly, many people first heard of monoclonal antibody drugs when these proteins were the best and only treatment available for COVID. But monoclonals could also be a gamechanger in the fights against malaria, Respiratory Syncytial Virus (or RSV), HIV, and many other infectious diseases.

Lumira DX and Butterfly ultrasound

Diagnostics is another promising frontier. Early in the pandemic, we worked to ensure that low-cost COVID tests were available while vaccines and therapeutics were in development. Now, some of those diagnostic innovations could be critical tools against other illnesses.

Take the Lumira DX. This is an inexpensive, sensitive, and very portable point-of-care diagnostic system that allows health workers to go into remote communities and get highly accurate COVID results within just 12 minutes. We worked with the innovators behind Lumira to get devices distributed to communities in need. Now, with our support, they are optimizing the device to diagnose other diseases in the field, such as RSV, tuberculosis, or Human papillomavirus (or HPV).

Similarly, while ultrasounds and x-rays are taken for granted in wealthy countries, two-thirds of the world don’t have access to them. So, we’ve been supporting Royal Philips and the US firm Butterfly as they develop affordable handheld ultrasound devices that can be plugged into a mobile phone.

On a recent trip to Kenya, I saw Philips’ AI-enabled ultrasound, which can help anyone understand the results—even people without advanced medical training. It can identify high-risk pregnancies and is even better than humans at estimating gestational age.

Both devices could bring the lifesaving power of ultrasound to every community, allowing for early detection and remote diagnosis of life-threatening issues.

AI

That’s just one illustration of the awesome transformative potential of artificial intelligence – which is on everyone’s minds lately.

By almost all estimations, rapid advances in AI technology will fundamentally alter the way people communicate, work, learn, and improve their well-being. As such, the possibilities for improving global health through AI are massive. It could speed medical breakthroughs, revolutionize campaigns against disease, connect more people to life-saving medical expertise, help farmers grow more healthy and nutritious food – if it’s developed and deployed with equity in mind.

Communities must have a say in the development and implementation of AI that will affect them. And we must continue to emphasize equitable access through continuous research, collaboration, and open communication with stakeholders.

So many of the public health disparities we face have their roots in unequal access to innovations. Those are exactly the places we need to apply AI as a force for good. There’s so much potential for positive change if AI is rolled out with equity in mind – AI-enabled ultrasounds alone have the potential to save thousands of mothers and babies’ lives.

That’s why our foundation recently launched a Grand Challenge request for proposals to fund AI projects focused on health and development by innovators in LMICs – to see that these technologies are co-created by, and designed to benefit, the communities they could help most.

For those who may not be familiar, our foundation’s Grand Challenges program is a family of initiatives fostering innovation to solve key global health and development problems for those most in need. We work with many partners around the world to identify the most pressing challenges to be addressed and solicit requests for grant proposals to help identify innovative solutions to solving those challenges.

For the AI Grand Challenge, we received more than 1,300 proposals from almost 50 countries, with greater than 80% of applications coming from low-and middle-income countries. We could not be more excited about the potential impact of these projects and look forward to sharing developments on the proposals and projects over the coming months.

We need all hands on deck

There’s a huge market out there for inventions and innovations in global health – and incredible potential for impact. Engineers and computer scientists can save lives just as doctors and nurses do.

Our foundation partners with governments, philanthropies, non-profits, and plenty of commercial ventures, as private sector businesses are often uniquely adept at moving transformative technologies from idea to market. We all have a role to play – and whatever you focus on – the world needs your innovation and inspiration.

The UK government has committed to investing £20 billion per year in research and development by 2025, and the UK plays a vital role in supporting the global health agenda and funding life-saving programs like the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, and the campaign to eradicate polio.

But increased private sector and philanthropic investment can make this funding go further, bringing fresh talent, scale of impact, and much needed expertise. And as one of the world’s leading tech sectors, there is an enormous opportunity here to save lives and enrich communities.

By harnessing the UK’s technological and science talent to meet today’s global health challenges, you can help create the next cycle of innovations that will change the world for the better. And you can help ensure that everyone, no matter where they live, can thrive.

Thank you.