#90 🍩 Amazon's Bio Discovery platform, Peptides & a $96M RNA Manufacturing Facility
What is happening in health tech & innovation?
Hello friends,
I don’t know about you but I’m still recovering from the energy overdose that is Sunrise.
Shoutout to the Blackbird crew for once again bringing the vibes, Anthropic for some killer parties and merch with their Sydney office launch, and of course, all our wonderful health friends.
Talking of conferences - it’s nearly that special time of year where we squish the wholeeee health industry into a few small rooms to network (and facilitate winter flu & COVID spread), starting with Digital Health Festival & AusMedtech.
(and we can’t forget the PTA Congress & Breaking the Silos: The Women’s Health MedTech Summit in Sydney, the week after).
So naturally, to ensure you don’t miss out, we’re doing a giveaway…
🎫 Want a free ticket to the Digital Health Fest? 🎫
We have a few to give away to WTH readers! 🍩
All you need to do is be a paid subscriber (we love you), like this newsletter and hit reply and you’ll go in the draw to win a free ticket
Okies dokes, onto the news…
🐣 TODAY’S ISSUE
Noteworthy
Funding
Newsworthy
AI Updates
Sick Science
Startup Stuff
Events
Cool Content
Noteworthy 🗞️
Funding
💊 Blackmores invested $10M in BiomeBank, to scale medical-grade prebiotic microbiome therapies derived from microorganisms in the human gut, across international markets’
🧼 Clean Slate Clinic closed $4.3M to accelerate Australia’s leading alcohol detox platform
🩹 Nutromics secured AU$3M in CRC Grant funding to help support development of it’s world’s first wearable sepsis management patch
🤖 Andromeda, a humanoid robotics company tackling loneliness in aged care deployed its 22nd Abi bot with Victorian provider Mecwacare
💡 Regis Healthcare benefitted from recent $3B federal aged care reforms, boosting valuation to $1.82B and 18% revenue growth
🤰 Baymatob (CUREator+ ANDHealth portfolio company) received NSW Gov funding to advance Oli, its AI maternal-foetal health platform
Newsworthy
💉 Microsoft is set to invest $25B in Aus over the next 3 years to expand AI and cloud capacity, strengthen cybersecurity, and access to digital skills across the country
🎧 Cochlear shares plunged 40%, reaching it’s lowest share price in more than a decade
Leading to speculations about flat-lining revenue due to Middle East conflict or broader company concerns
🧬 The NSW Gov opened its $96M RNA Research & Manufacturing Facility in the Macquarie University Innovation Precinct to boost development of domestic vaccines and therapeutics
📚 NHMRC injected $10.5M into Australian health and medical research to reduce the impact of chronic non-communicable diseases and health inequities
🏥 UNSW joined partners to open Aus’s first purpose-built children’s comprehensive cancer centre, bringing research & clinical care together to speed up new treatments
💰 A Nous Group Report, finds Australia’s medical research institutes generate $4.07B in annual economic benefit while delivering modest returns
✨ NSW Gov is expanding pharmacist prescribing powers to allow eligible adults to access the contraceptive pill without a GP visit from June 1
🌍 Vic is apparently Australia’s leading startup hub, attracting record investment with 4,400 startups valued at $139B
🧑⚕️ Heidi Health announced its integration with Epic’s Haiku app, extending seamless clinical workflows from desktop to mobile
While also hitting $US50M ARR, solidifying their position as the fastest growing Aussie tech company since Canva
🏥 Monash Health signed a partnership MoU with Medtech Actuator, connecting clinical experts and innovators with commercialisation pathways and industry networks
💊 ADHD prescription changes will allow pharmacists to issue repeat prescriptions, saving families around ~$10M annually
🦅 Lyrebird Health announced Dr Ray Boyapati, founder of MedEntry joined as Chief Clinical Officer
👶 Navi Medical Technologies has expanded its Neonav® system to support real-time catheter placement & monitoring in newborns, giving clinicians a safer way to care for critically ill babies in NICU
📉 Cochlear, CSL & ResMed are facing a sharp investor reset, as earnings shocks, market pressure & changing healthcare trends drag down Aus’s biotech giants
US & Beyond the Borders
🔬 Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan dropped $500M into their Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, launching a Virtual Biology Initiative to simulate how cells behave at the microlevel
🧠 President Trump signed an executive order fast-tracking psychedelics research as a treatment for serious mental illness, accelerating FDA reviews and unlocking $50M in matched funding for state research programs
🧪 Iterative Health closed a $77M Series C, led by Google Ventures, to transform clinical trial processes
🩻 Aidoc raised $150M Series E to advance AI capabilities across CT and X-ray workflows
🩸 Superpower announced its new offering, Superpower Peptides. While joining forces with GRAIL to give members earlier detection of 50+ cancer types from a single blood draw
🤝 WHOOP got a contract with the US Navy to support operational readiness and reduce fatigue-related risk across naval forces
🩺 Eli Lilly announced a global R&D collaboration and licensing deal to develop AI-discovered drugs worth up to $2.75 billion with Insilico Medicine
Marking a huge shift in Big Pharma from using AI tools to licensing AI built drug pipelines
💰 Fitbit founders announced the launch of their new AI startup, Luffu, integrating scattered health information across devices into one “intelligent family system”
🤝 Johnson & Johnson is set to acquire Atraverse Medical, a device company pioneering next-generation left-heart access and radiofrequency technology
🩺 Novo Nordisk announced the implementation of a full-stack drug discovery and operations system powered by OpenAI
💍 Oura acquired Galen AI, an AI-powered personal health companion, to integrate fragmented medical records and lab data with Oura’s wearable biometrics
With 5.5M+ rings sold and an ~$11B valuation, it’s positioning itself to own the sensor layer, unify health data, and deliver real-time, AI-driven guidance
💰 CVS Health launched Health100 in collaboration with Google Cloud to provide consumers a 24/7 personal healthcare partner
🖊️ Isomorphic Labs, a DeepMind spinoff, is sending AI-Designed drugs to human trials
🏋️ ZOE reduced its platform costs using AI trained on 300,000 microbiome samples, to deliver personalised gut health advice without requiring user testing
🧬 SiranBio has licensed its Phase I siRNA candidate SA030 to GSK in a deal worth up to ~US$1B, targeting abdominal fat & cardiometabolic risk across lung, liver & kidney disease
💊 Sun Pharma is buying Organon for US$11.75B
🤖 AI Updates
🎯 Amazon launched its Bio Discovery platform, giving scientists access to biological AI models to advance research capability.
Sparking interest about whether it will succeed or go down in history like Amazon care in 2022…
💰 Google will invest $US10bn in Anthropic at its last valuation, with another potential $US30bn en route
🏋️♀️ Google Health is replacing the Fitbit app with one central hub for fitness, sleep, vitals, medical records & AI coaching from Gemini
⛔️ A researcher invented a fake health condition, which AI chatbots Gemini, Chat GPT, Copilot and Perplexity informed patients was real
The fake papers were also reportedly cited in peer reviewed literature… lol
✨ Meta is expanding its child safety tools adding AI chat monitoring to enable parents to see search topics
🐋 DeepSeek AI released a new model DeepSeek-V4, claiming superior performance to legacy models, running at a lower cost with Chinese Ascend chips
✨ OpenAI introduces OpenAI Frontier, a new platform helping enterprises build, deploy and manage AI agents
🤝 Anthropic is offering to share internal data with the federal government in a collaboration to boost AI uptake and unlock productivity gains
⚠️ LLMs are falling short in mental health care, focusing on isolated signals rather than evolving risk patterns of mental crises
The proposed shift: integrate clinical psychology rigour enabling systems to assess intent, context, and vulnerability more like a clinician
⚕OpenAI is turning its attention to clinicians, with a new ChatGPT tool to support medical research and documentation. Free for verified U.S. practitioners, with broader rollout planned.
⚠️ AI is now setting pay rates in an “Uber for nurses” model, using performance data to control shift access and pricing, enabling nurses to bid for work
Concerns that gig-style healthcare may drive a race to the bottom on pay and conditions
🤝 Novartis CEO, Vas Narasimhan, joined Anthropic’s board, becoming the first pharmaceutical executive on its governing body
🧪 Biossil announced a US$43M round backed by Peter Thiel and OpenAI, to reactivate abandoned drugs, taking them through to approval faster and more cost-efficiently
⚠️ MIT Media Labs researchers suggest that “cognitive offloading“ to AI could be having a corrosive effect on our mental abilities
Researchers found the ChatGPT group showed reduced brain activity by up to 55%
Sick Science
🫀 Does Long COVID Raise Heart Disease Risk?
A 2025 Stockholm cohort study of 1.2M non-hospitalised adults revealed those with physician-diagnosed Long COVID faced 2x higher cardiovascular events. Particularly, arrhythmias and coronary disease with stronger effects in women. This calls for routine heart screening & sex-specific follow-up in primary care to catch risks early in community cases.
🥼 Can AI Predict Breast Cancer Better Than Doctors?
A 2026 Lancet Digital Health study found Australia’s BRAIx AI tool, trained on 400,000 mammograms, could estimate a woman’s 4-year breast cancer risk more accurately than traditional factors like age or family history. Women who were flagged in the top 2% faced a 9.7% risk of breast cancer diagnosis, which was higher than BRCA gene carriers. Potentially, unlocking more personalised screening from age 40 through AI-based risk scores, moving beyond the one-size-fits-all model, to enable earlier detection and a reduction in mortalities.
😺 Can Gut Metabolites Predict Early Cognitive Decline?
A 2026 Gut Microbes study of 150 adults found that blood metabolites linked to gut bacteria may help distinguish healthy ageing from early cognitive decline. Cognitively impaired individuals showed lower levels of protective compounds and higher levels of potentially harmful ones. Using six key metabolites, AI models classified stages of decline with up to 79% accuracy (and up to 84–90% when comparing healthy adults with cognitively impaired groups). The findings highlight the gut–brain connection and point to a simple, minimally invasive way to detect decline earlier.
Startup Stuff 🚀
Ready to take your tech startup to the national stage?
Entries are open to Startup&Angels 2026 Australian Technologies Competition. A multi-month growth journey providing expert mentoring, growth workshops, masterclasses, world-class networking, national recognition and your chance to win big. Apply by May 10 - More here
Interested in researching at Anthropic?
Anthropic’s STEM Fellows Program is a short-term opportunity for scientists and engineers to work alongside frontier AI research teams. You’ll be applying domain expertise to evaluate and improve models like Claude across real-world scientific and engineering problems. The program starts June 15 - September 15 with the potential for extension - More here
Deep Tech founder looking to turn your research into a real world venture?
Curtin University’s DeepStart program is a 3 month accelerator backed by RTCM Trailblazer in collaboration with Cicada innovations and Greentown Labs. Providing researchers, startups and SMES with a range of opportunities, including a $5K grant and access to a $500K investment pool, to accelerate commercialisation and investment readiness. Applications close 12 June - More here
Looking for a health tech startup launchpad?
Health 10x is a leading Australian medtech accelerator, offering $100k in funding and support to help startups scale globally. Built with UNSW Founders and The George Institute for Global Health, it backs founders solving major unmet health and medical needs - More here
Driving community-led public health change?
Applications are now open for the Ian Potter Foundation's Public Health program. Offering multi-year grants and minimum $100,000 per year. Supporting organisations to design and deliver evidence-based, preventative health initiatives in partnership with their communities. Funding focuses on improving long-term health outcomes in high-need populations through early-stage exploration, co-designed solutions, scaling proven pilots, and system-shifting public health innovation. EOIs open 28 May - More here
Events💥
15th May: BioMelbourne Network 2026 | Connecting Women Lunch (Melb)
19 - 21st May: AusMedtech 2026 (Perth)
20 - 21st May: Digital Health Festival (Melb)
21st May: Off the record | Real Stories of Medtech
22nd May: Innovate Medtech Masterclass
27 - 28th May: PTA Congress (Syd)
28th May: Breaking the Silos: The Women’s Health MedTech Summit (Syd)
11th June: ON Translate 2026 annual flagship event, bringing together the deep tech ecosystem community to share, learn, collaborate and celebrate together.
2 July: HealthHaus Sydney
Cool Content 💎
🐙 Coherence Neuro: Can This Tiny Brain Implant Increase Cancer Survival?
🧭 Compass, a biotech psychedelics company, reports positive Phase 3 clinical trial data for treatment-resistant depression [Read the press release]
📈 Early Moderna investor, Bianca Ogden has tapped into global medical momentum, delivering a 48% return for Platinum Asset Management
🦠 Researchers discover bioengineered chewing gum could fight oral cancer [Scientific Report]
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Adios for now,
👋 Emily,
Mariah & Team WTH
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Interesting move toward integrated AI + lab discovery systems, where continuous experimental feedback matters as much as the models themselves.