Exploring European Innovation in Mental Health

With Isaac Middlemann from EIT Health

TRANSCRIPT

CMHI: Isaac, thank you so much for joining us. Can you just tell us a little bit about EIT Health and particularly EIT Health’s work with mental health.

Isaac Middlemann: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. So yeah, it is a pan- European, health and life science, ecosystem. We are in charge of supporting innovation that comes out of European ecosystems from fundamental research, making sure that it's founded well as a startup, that it's validated well with real world data, and then it's able to scale towards the market and towards unmet patient needs.

We've been operational for about ten years. We've worked with over 3000 startups and scale ups in that period. Truly, from across Europe, including, smaller markets and smaller regions. When it comes to the neuro space, and the mental health space in particular. So, I mean, our remit per se is, is supporting all different forms of health innovation, but it's also, to really help shape the market, and shape, the ability of innovation to address needs, that haven't always been as identified as being critical as they should have been.

And the mental health and neuro space is a great example of one of those. Right, where there's, decades of obviously understanding that, cancer and other such, cardiometabolic diseases, for example, are critical to survival the critical not just to length of life, but also quality of life. It's obviously, as we all know, taken a lot longer for mental health to be taken, quote unquote, as seriously as that.

And so one of our roles, as well as ensuring that innovation in areas that are innovative, even by their very existence, if you will, are supported that the importance of those areas is underlined to policymakers and stakeholders and ultimately that the funders of innovation, at term, which is ultimately public money, in the form of public markets, but also private money in the form of private investors, understand the technology, value the technology, and elect to put their euro or their pound into this instead of into that.

And for that, they need de-risking. And that's really what our core activity is de-risking the technology in order to make sure that its scientific promise can be felt by patients. And my goodness, that's especially needed in the mental health space, in particular, for all the reasons I think are probably obvious to this audience. Hear, hear.

CMHI: Couldn't agree more. And when it comes to de-risking and shaping the market. Could you tell us a little bit about, maybe one area of mental health? Because there's many different areas of innovation, but one area of mental health where you have invested and you feel that it is being particularly successful. So you have shaped the market, but you're already starting to see that paid back, both in terms of financial returns but also impact returns.

Isaac Middlemann: Yeah. So it's hard to pick one. And it's hard to pick at a high level. But I'll do my best. So I would say one of the main hurdles, faced by a lot of mental health innovation in particular, is the ability for the positive data that's created through an innovation. Impact on a patient's journey or a patient's life to be, quantifiably measured by health care systems and health care practitioners.

You know, we live in a in a quantifiable world where data that is hard and so to say, is what's valued and it's valued in terms of evidence. It's valued in terms of how much something is worth and how much something is worth gives you it's price and it's reimbursement value and so on and so forth.

And so while this might seem to be somewhat further from the mental health field than, than some other technologies, I think one area that's shown real promise is the area, of innovation. That's allowed the detection of new biomarkers and biomarkers of the disorders and diseases themselves but also biomarkers that indicate quantifiable improvement in that disease or that disorder for the patient.

It's a little bit technical by definition. But that is ultimately what the regulators what the reimbursement bodies and the payers and what industry want to see in order to understand the value among they understand the value the money will flow and does flow into those technologies. So we're talking here about things that are very minimally or noninvasive new technologies that can augment what MRI what EKGs and what wearables can provide in terms of data and new ways of making those technologies minimally invasive not just in the sense of surgery, but also in the sense of the patient living with those devices through their daily life.

And that's not just a question of making the patient suffer less through the application of the technology. It's also because in an area like mental health, if the technology is a burden, the actual data isn't very good because the patient behaves differently because of the fact that they are wearing this thing on their skull, for example, that that's measuring, whatever it might be measuring.

Right. So minimally invasive in this cases is not just about, minimizing the negative impact of surgery. It's also about making sure that the data set that it's measuring is clean, in that it is accurate to the patient's typical experience technologies in that space. Have proven to be quite investable. They've proven to have come a long way, what with the promise of AI, but also new materials science and other such things.

And they've proven to create data sets that are then able to be effectively used by what we maybe sometimes more commonly associate with mental health. And that is, apps, algorithms, supporting innovations like that, that at the end of the day, only work if the baseline data is accurate and if we know what we should be measuring and what good versus bad to put it over really simply, of course.

But what that even looks like in a real world setting.

CMHI: Last great question. I know EIT Health does a lot to build the European ecosystem, but also to plug the European ecosystem into other global ecosystems, whether it be in the Americas or in Asia, etc.. Can you just say a little bit about that? Because obviously that too is shaping the market and it's shaping the opportunities, and it's particularly important when we start to think about scale and that interregional connectivity.

Isaac Middlemann: Yeah. Thanks for the great question. This is a real deep seeded belief of mind and of ours. You know, connecting the European ecosystem with its fractured landscape, its different regulatory reimbursement models and so on and so forth. That is our DNA. We've been doing that for ten years. We've had a lot of success. But there is also, still a lot of work to be done for honest.

And that remains an ambition and, and in fact, a need of ours when it's absolutely true to your question, that if we limit our ambition to us being able to work better and well with each other as Europeans, we are underselling our potential, and we're underselling ultimately what even our own patients and societies need. A European originating innovation that delivers its market solution to market here in Europe, but then goes on to scale and additionally not instead, but additionally deliver its value to markets and patients elsewhere around the world.

That is a good thing, not a bad thing. That is European born innovation addressing a global need, that we're seeing across many ecosystems. And again, mental health is a particular area of focus here. It's a particularly nice proof point of the fact that these are global challenges that developed economies certainly, but also developing economies are facing globally.

It's also true that if you're a European patient and you are suffering from a disease or struggling to obtain an accurate diagnosis, diagnosis of a disease, as a patient, you don't really care which lab this technology originally came out of. You just want to get the cure. You want to be treated. You want to see improvement in your symptoms and so on and so forth.

So our ambition there is a complex one, but it's simple to state we believe that the European ecosystem is a sandbox where global collaboration between like minded stakeholders working together to crack challenges in health and mental health is a great example of that could and should locate that collaboration on an international level. But whether they are investors or industry players or public entities or others from left or from right, from middle or from upper, from down, you know, from anywhere around the globe we want them to be able to build that value here in Europe.

We believe that that will bolster the European innovation ecosystem. It'll create positive spillover effects for European patients. It'll create jobs and, and, further strengthen the European innovation ecosystem from an economic perspective, which is also critical. But we also think the European ecosystem has quite a few strengths that we can leverage in this international collaborative space. The relative, the cost efficient way in which we build and validate and scale innovation here compared to other global markets.

The fact that because European countries are relatively small individually, people start out from day zero, as it were, with a more international perspective to growth and towards addressing unmet market needs. Those are assets that we should and could leverage even more than we already do. Pull in the knowledge and build solutions that are truly valid and valuable in a global sense to address, these focus areas.

And I'll just end by saying, I think this is being confirmed at the present time by some of the statements coming out of international bodies, be that the WHO, the OECD, some of the G7, exchanges, etc., that mental health and brain health goes beyond simply addressing an unmet medical need. And it's about the well-being in the broadest, truest sense of society.

It's about economic resiliency, and it's about really meeting the needs of populations in a way that goes well beyond the limits of a national or even an international boundary, but really affects all populations worldwide. And so mental health is a particularly fertile ground to prove that larger point in, in a way that I think is understandable by some of those stakeholders that don't only think about health day in and day out.

And that's very much our mission, is to make sure Europe has a seat at that table.

CMHI: Amazing. Thank you Isaac.

Isaac Middlemann: Thank you.