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Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief Jennifer L. Schenker
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France this week announced a plan to help it become a global leader in artificial intelligence-powered precision medicine through a new €33 million consortium project led by French AI biotech company Owkin and funded by Bpifrance, the French public investment bank.. Born of a collaboration between Owkin and Gustave Roussy, Europe's leading cancer hospital, PortrAlt will see research hospitals and pathology labs across France working with French technology leaders to develop and deploy new digital pathology AI tools to improve cancer treatment. The project aims to build at least 15 AI-based tools to improve the diagnosis of cancer, the discovery of new treatment biomarkers and the prediction of patient outcomes in hospitals across France. If it reaches its potential the project could advance precision medicine, the matching of the right drugs or treatments to the right people based on a genetic or molecular understanding of their disease. Globally, despite significant advancements in medical technology, reaching a definitive diagnosis for many diseases still requires the microscopic evaluation of clinical tissue samples by surgical pathologists. In 2019, the European Union approved the usage of whole slide scans for such primary diagnoses, allowing routine glass histopathology slides to be digitized and presented to pathologists for review on computer monitors. The French project will train machine learning models to spot minutely different patterns in patients’ diseases in digital pathology slides. (Slides of patients’ tissue samples at University Hospital Erlangen are pictured here). By adopting digital pathology and AI, pathologists can begin screening patients much earlier and more cost-effectively than comprehensive genomic profiling or other techniques, improving overall diagnostic yield and increasing the number of patients who can benefit from precision medicine. Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most important technology stories impacting business. |
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| May Lou Jepsen disrupts industries, especially when there is a chance to make technology affordable for all. She and MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte launched One Laptop Per Child, a non-profit that made and sold inexpensive laptops targeted at children in developing countries. Negroponte developed the business model, selling $100 laptops in bulk to schools around the world, while Jepsen engineered and built the machines. At the time laptops sold by incumbents were priced at thousands of dollars putting them out of the reach of most people.
Now Jepsen, a PhD who has led projects at Intel, Google, Facebook, and Oculus and earned 250 patents, launched 50 products and generated billions in revenue by leveraging consumer electronics’ trillion-dollar supply chain, is out to do the same in healthcare. Most of the world’s population can’t have their diseases adequately diagnosed or treated; their depression understood. Jepsen’s California-based company Openwater wants to replace the costly approaches of today’s world with non-invasive tools, based on lasers and ultrasound and consumer electronics. For example, with a wearable head visor that could cost the same as a smart phone. (see the photo).
If the technology achieves its potential it could revolutionize the way strokes, cancers and mental disease are diagnosed and treated, drastically improving healthcare, and disrupting the revenues of industry players like Siemens, Philips and General Electric that sell MRI machines for $1 million to $3 million, as well as hospitals that charge a premium for the scans. |
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Who: Maciej Kolazykowski leads the World Economic Forum’s Advanced Energy Solutions sector which engages leaders in frontier segments of the energy system such as clean hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuel [SAF], advanced biofuels, new nuclear, storage, demand management, services and carbon management. Before joining the Forum he worked in the Office of the Prime Minister of Poland and at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs dealing with international energy negotiations. Kolaczkowski started his career at the Polish Oil & Gas Company in the strategy department.
Topic: How the World Economic Forum is trying to help accelerate the energy transition.
Quote: "There is a need for innovators, large energy companies, corporations that are large consumers of energy and investors to play their parts. We also need government to create conditions for that. That’s why we created this community. We want to shorten the time needed for deployment of advanced solutions from decades to years and months." |
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Belgium-based EnergyVision provides renewable energy solutions and charging services for electric vehicles to businesses and consumers based on a no capex business model. The company, which operates in Belgium, Morocco, and China, has built and operates over 12,000 energy projects, generating over 630 million kWh of green electricity per year.
The company installs rooftop solar panels and electric vehicle charging infrastructure free of charge. The Belgian scale-up arranges everything: financing, installation, insurance, maintenance, and monitoring. Customers are only charged for the energy they use.
EnergyVision's business model helps small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) to become more sustainable and save an average of 50% on their electricity bills by paying a lower energy price per kWh.
The company is a member of the World Economic Forum’ Advanced Energy Solutions community which aims to speed up deployment of advanced energy solutions. (For more on the Forum’s new community see The Innovator’s Interview Of The Week) |
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| Number of stolen banking, social media and email accounts for sale to hackers on a suspected Russian marketplace that was shut down this week by the U.S., Europol, and police in 14 countries. The international action conducted April 4 and 5 against Genesis Market, one of the largest so-called initial access brokers in the world, resulted in 119 arrests. The Wall Street Journal reported that those arrested were mainly buyers of identity data seeking to break into companies and government offices worldwide to deploy ransomware, commit fraud and conduct other criminal activity. The multinational take down operation against Genesis Market included more than 400 law-enforcement actions in countries including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the U.K., according to the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation, the European legal agency. The marketplace told would-be buyers its credentials came from 1.5 million compromised computers and mobile devices. Also for sale were device “fingerprints,” unique identifiers and browser cookies that can skirt anti-fraud tools at many websites. |
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