Inside clinic which uses HD cameras, radar and lasers during controversial high-tech MOTs
A new high-tech screening clinic co-founded by the boss of Spotify hopes to revolutionise healthcare by picking up signs of disease long before there are any symptoms.
Neko Health uses high resolution cameras, lasers and radar to capture millions of data points around the body, checking for problems that could become serious and even life-threatening in future.
It’s the latest in a wave of companies offering controversial high-tech MOTs. Some doctors warn they may increase health inequities and add to NHS workload by referring people with potentially insignificant findings.
Daniel Ek – the chief executive of the music streaming service – and his partner Hjalmar Nilsonne want to engage with the debate.
In one of the clinic’s softly-lit scanning rooms, Hjalmar tells me that healthcare has traditionally been about treating symptoms – “reactive”, as he calls it.
Co-founder Hjalmar Nilsonne says people need to be given long-term health not medicine
“We have to find a way to become more proactive, more preventative, to help people stay healthy longer,” he says.
“Instead of giving them medicine, give them long-term health.”
Neko Health’s first clinic outside its hometown of Stockholm, Sweden, is a world away from the busy London shopping street that it lies beneath.
A total of nine cameras take more than 2,000 images of your skin
It looks like something straight out of sci-fi.
In the centre of the room is a booth not unlike the teleporters in Star Trek.
Step inside and nine cameras – HD, 3D and thermal – take more than 2,000 images to build a high-resolution map of every mole, freckle and blemish on your skin.
If you return for annual checks it allows the clinic to track changes in size, pigmentation and other warning signs of skin cancer.
Next to the booth there’s more tech that could easily have been wielded by Star Trek’s Dr McCoy on his starship crewmates.
Lasers are able to spot early signs of cardiovascular disease
To spot early signs of cardiovascular disease lasers analyse the stiffness of arterial walls, shimmering patterns of green light check blood circulation and blood pressure cuffs take simultaneous readings on all four limbs.
There’s a blood sample taken too to measure cholesterol, blood glucose, biomarkers of inflammation and lots more.
In less than an hour millions of data points are collected and analysed, with a doctor explaining the findings.
For the record I, like 79% of those scanned in the Stockholm clinic’s first year, got a clean bill of health.
But 14% of the clients in Sweden needed medical treatment for something picked up in the health check. And 1% had potentially life-saving care for serious problems they were previously unaware of.
In less than an hour millions of data points are collected and analysed
More than three-quarters of customers have booked again for a year’s time. Most, it seems, consider the checks worth the £300 cost.
It’s a growing market.
You can pay several thousands to companies offering whole-body MRI scans to see what’s going on below the skin.
Kim Kardashian gave a celebrity buzz to a company called Prenuvo by referring to its scanner as a “life-saving machine” in an Instagram post.
The shift towards disease prevention has big champions.
Professor Sir John Bell, now of the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford, was instrumental in creating the UK Biobank, Genomics England, and more recently the Our Future Health study – all initiatives to dive deep into patient data to spot signs of disease.
Professor Sir John Bell says preventative health checks will be the norm in the next 10 years
He says preventative health checks will be the norm in the next 10 years.
Not the rudimentary lifestyle questionnaires the NHS offers to mid-life patients now. There’ll be far more tech – and AI – running the rule over our inner health.
But it’s a mindshift for the NHS.
“People don’t want to talk to you about cardiac problems until you have chest pain, and then they’re quite keen to talk to you,” Professor Bell says.
“But the trouble is, they picked it up too late because for the last 35 or 40 years it’s been accumulating in your cardiac vessels. You’ve been asymptomatic, so nobody’s done anything about it.
“Understanding which diseases you have and capturing them fast at their earliest stage will mean you have a much longer, healthy life expectancy.”
But other doctors are more cautious.
Dr Saira Ghafur, a respiratory physician at Imperial College London, is concerned that the people who are most likely to have underlying health problems are the least likely to be able to afford private check-ups. It could make existing health inequalities even worse, she fears.
Dr Saira Ghafur fears health MOTs could worsen inequalities
There’s also the risk private health checks will add to NHS waiting lists, Dr Ghafur tells me. They’ll pick up lots of issues that need NHS follow-up but ultimately turn out to be nothing to worry about.
And then there’s the lack of evidence that the issues picked up actually matter.
“We have to make sure that we’re doing prevention right,” she says. “For that, we need a very strong evidence base.
“But we are going to have to wait many years to be able to show that doing this screening, collecting these data points, has actually resulted in better (health) outcomes.”
That hasn’t deterred people from signing up to Neko Health. Its Stockholm clinic has a waiting list of 20,000 and it expects strong demand for checks at its London branch.
Hjalmar Nilsonne comes from a family of doctors and says he understands the concerns of an overworked medical profession.
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The company does follow-up checks itself to be sure the problems picked up on scan are significant before telling people to seek NHS treatment.
He wants the health service to see preventative health checks as a help, not a hindrance.
“70% of the healthcare costs in society come from chronic disease,” he says. “Most chronic disease can be prevented or greatly delayed if you find it early enough.
“So we’re really focused on finding the early signs that things are going in the wrong direction and helping you find the ways to counteract that and avoid it in the first place.”
Hundreds of barber shops and other cash-heavy businesses have been targeted in a three-week money laundering blitz.
Police went to 265 premises, including vape shops, nail bars, American-themed sweet shops and car washes across England in a crackdown on high street crime.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) said 35 arrests were made, 97 people suspected to be victims of modern slavery were placed under police protection, and bank accounts containing more than £1m were frozen.
More than £40,000 in cash, some 200,000 cigarettes, 7,000 packs of tobacco, and more than 8,000 illegal vapes were also seized during Operation Machinize, which involved 19 different police forces and regional organised crime units.
Officers also found two cannabis farms containing a total of 150 plants, while 10 shops have been shut down.
The NCA estimates that £12bn of criminal cash is generated in the UK each year with businesses such as barber shops, vape shops, nail bars, American-themed sweet shops and car washes often used by criminals.
Goods seized during a visit to a vape shop in Rochdale. Pic: GMP/PA
Police officers at a shop in Tameside. Pic: GMP/PA
Rachael Herbert, deputy director of the National Economic Crime Centre at the NCA, said: “Operation Machinize targeted barber shops and other high street businesses being used as cover for a whole range of criminality, all across the country.
“We have seen links to drug trafficking and distribution, organised immigration crime, modern slavery and human trafficking, firearms, and the sale of illicit tobacco and vapes.
“We know cash-intensive businesses are used as fronts for money laundering, facilitating some of the highest harm and highest impact offending in the UK.”
Money laundering crackdown. Pic: NCA
Security minister Dan Jarvis said the operation “highlights the scale and complexity of the criminality our towns and cities face”.
“High street crime undermines our security, our borders, and the confidence of our communities, and I am determined to take the decisive action necessary to bring those responsible to justice,” he said.
UK
‘I don’t look at myself as a dying person anymore’: New drug that slows incurable breast cancer now available on the NHS
A groundbreaking new cancer treatment, hailed by patients as “game-changing”, will be available via the NHS from today.
The drug capivasertib has been shown in trials to slow the spread of the most common form of incurable breast cancer.
Taken in conjunction with an already-available hormonal therapy, it has been shown in trials to double how long treatment will keep the cancer cells from progressing.
“I don’t look at myself anymore as a dying person,” says Elen Hughes, who has been using the drug since February this year.
“I look at myself as a thriving person, who will carry on thriving for as long as I possibly can.”
Elen Hughes says capivasertib has extended her life and improved its quality
Mrs Hughes, from North Wales, was first diagnosed with primary breast cancer in 2008.
Eight years later, then aged 46 and with three young children, she was told the cancer had returned and spread.
She says that capivasertib, which she has been able to access via private healthcare, has not only extended her life but improved its quality with fewer side effects than previous medications.
It also delays the need for more aggressive blanket treatments like chemotherapy.
Capivasertib is now available from the NHS
“What people don’t understand is that they might look at the statistics and see that [the therapy] is effective for eight months versus two months, or whatever,” says Mrs Hughes.
“But in cancer, and the land that we live in, really we can do a lot in six months.”
Mrs Hughes says her cancer therapy has allowed her “to see my daughter get married” and believes it is “absolutely brilliant” that the new drug will be available to more patients via the NHS.
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence approved capivasertib for NHS-use after two decades of research by UK teams.
Professor Nicholas Turner, from the Institute of Cancer Research which led the study, told Sky News it was a “great success story for British science”.
Professor Nicholas Turner wants urgent genetic testing of patients with advanced breast cancers to see if they could benefit
The new drug is suitable for patients’ tumours with mutations or alterations in the PIK3CA, AKT1 or PTEN genes, which are found in approximately half of patients with advanced breast cancer.
Read more:
How AI could transform breast screening results
Breast cancer cases and deaths set to surge – study
Prof Turner says hundreds of patients could see the benefit in the immediate future, with thousands more people identified over time.
“We need new drugs that will help our existing therapies work for longer, and that’s where this new drug, capivasertib comes in,” says Prof Turner.
“It doubles how long hormone therapy treatment works for, giving patients precious extra time with their families.”
He called for urgent genetic testing of patients with advanced breast cancers to see if they could benefit.
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