Four For Friday | June 13, 2025
LF177 | Health tech reprogrammed, digital biomarkers of aging, China's robot push, Roundup's reckoning + Google Gen AI library
Welcome to this week’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week, together with a bonus: AI Tip of The Week.
1. Health tech, reprogrammed
I enjoy finding impact-obsessed change-makers with oversize ambition and the smarts to deliver. As such, I’m enjoying this brand new deep tech-focused Substack - 1000ba by an Okinawa-based impact investor Koshu Kunii and Ander López, an Entrepreneurship Manager from the Basque Culinary Center, in Bilbao.
Their newsletter looks at “how AI, climate change, and geopolitics are reshaping the foundational layers of human and planetary health.” It continues: “We live in a time when biology is (re)programmable, nature is intervenable, and national borders are increasingly fluid.”
Their latest post posits a future healthcare that’s very different than today’s - a distributed emergent, data-driven sensing network, powered by new AI driven genetic based personalises models and environmental networks.
The $9 trillion healthcare industry today is fundamentally broken; 10 million die annually from lack of access while half of medical data sits unused. Three forces are converging to reshape the sector:
AI models like AlphaFold compress protein prediction from years to hours, while synthetic control arms slash trial costs.
Climate change expands disease vectors and threatens food security.
Geopolitical tensions drive countries to build sovereign bio-stacks (e.g. 90% of US antibiotics depend on China).
The result: healthcare will shift from institutional to decentralized, predictive systems featuring always-on diagnostics, AI-native treatments, and autonomous care agents that monitor health continuously rather than merely treating disease. When exactly that happens, and where first, is another question.
The So What? Love this bold thinking, but we also need similarly ambitious efforts to reshape democracy, which is currently failing to enable these kinds of spectacular benefits to their citizens.
2. Digital biomarkers - measure your ageing speed
The trouble with working on longevity is that it’s hard to prove your intervention is effective. Nobody wants to wait for decades, and along the way, test subjects won’t have largely identical lives that would make it possible to assess whether a single intervention worked.
The Biomarkers of Aging Consortium is addressing this - they’re looking to create a set of easy-access biomarkers to predict the rate of aging. Their just-released paper catalogued digital biomarkers that predict biological age using consumer tech, and found they could monitor eight physiological systems for aging - from sleep patterns to cardiovascular metrics. This has the advantage of providing continuous ageing assessment outside clinics, accessible via smartphone apps, wearable sensors and machine vision to detect facial aging.
Still a bit early for clinical validation, but it seems these tools could democratise precision medicine for healthy ageing. This would be a welcome shift from sporadic medical check-ups to constant biometric surveillance.
The So What? Further democratization of the tools for longevity, now with more rigor behind what they’re measuring.
3. China goes all in for robots for ageing
Not that this should be surprising anybody who’s looked at the country’s demographics, but there’s a massive need for innovative ways to care for older Chinese. This article identifies a new national pilot programme deploying robots in elderly care to tackle its demographic crisis.
With over 300 million 60-plus Chinese and labour shortages mounting, Beijing is looking for humanoid assistants to help out. The elderly-care robot market, valued at $1.1 billion in 2023, could reach $2.2 billion by 2029.
The programme targets home, community and institutional settings, addressing everything from disabled assistance to emotional support. By 2035, authorities promise a "mature" nationwide care system. It will be interesting to see roll out; in Japan, despite decades of investment, only 10% of care institutions use robots.
The So What? Robots alone won’t solve aging challenges - will be interested to see what other regulatory, business and behavioural changes they roll out too.
4. Roundup’s reckoning
The world's most comprehensive study on glyphosate - the active ingredient in Roundup - has found it causes cancer. Leukemia emerged as the standout concern, but tumors were detected across eight body systems, from rare nervous system cancers to liver and thyroid malignancies.
Most troubling was exposure was at low levels which fell under the EU's "acceptable daily intake" level. Glyphosate has been detected in over 80% of Americans' urine, making this likely one of the most interesting under-the-radar indicators to track.
The So What? Look for glyphosate to be one of an increasing number of environmental toxins that will be under consumer and legal scrutiny.
Bonus AI tidbit: Google’ AI use cases
Who’s actually using gen AI? Google has put together a treasure trove of 600+ use cases of gen AI in the real world, covering 11 major industry groups, and within those, six agent types: Customer, Employee, Creative, Code, Data, and Security. Enjoy browsing.
That’s all for now; happy weekend everyone.
- Stephen