Weekly Brief: Drug abuse? Time for Warren G to regulate!

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Everyone in the Work in Startups office (and probably the entire UK) has come down with something… the Brexit headache. It is commonly brought on by EU Exit developments (or lack-there-of) dominating the headlines. So we thought we’d focus on a more satisfying area of news this week – MedTech (in no small part because we may require seriously innovative painkilling devices until 22nd May…)

There’s one crafty story in particular that you might have missed. Two particularly wiley US firms, that specialise in matching patients to doctors online, are making a killing (no pun intended) through marketing several highly-regulated drugs for “off-label” purposes like erectile dysfunction and anxiety. Seemingly not hindered by pesky things like FDA regulation since they aren’t the prescribers themselves (their platform doctors are), they’re able to champion the benefits of their drugs without any of the “warning, may cause the following horrible side effects” messaging. A win for everyone? Perhaps Mrs May or the Google team should check out their products as they battle headaches and EU fines alike! Certainly some lessons in here if your business is trying to negotiate around a frustrating regulator at the moment…

MedTech at large continues to rake in the VC money in both the UK and US markets – yet another antidote to some of the more pessimistic Brexit headlines about the future of British startups. We’re very much sold on the industry as a whole – off-label pharmaceutical antidotes, we’re still holding out on though!

Startups Are Hawking Zoloft and Beta-Blockers for Off-Label Uses

Across the pond, there’s a somewhat worrying breakout in US Medtech as Hims Inc. and Kick Health have been marketing Sertraline/Zoloft and Propanalol (a betablocker) respectively, for off-label uses.

Is the UK leading the way in med tech and innovation?

Even with all the Brexit uncertainty, the UK MedTech market promises to thrive, in what is described as a ‘perfect storm’ of tech advances and great need in healthcare.

Healthcare Startups Raised $1.5 Billion In March

This rather neutral headline belies the fact that said eye-watering number is down (by almost 50% – eek) year-on-year from 2018. This is based on Pitchbook’s analysis for Forbes. It’s not quite time to despair in the US: in the first quarter of this year they raised a whopping $6.8 billion of VC dollar!

These are some of our favourite startup jobs this week (MedTech or no):

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Happy Hunting! Happy Hiring!

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