This is the first in a series of quarterly publications for the Global Health Council looking at drug development, healthcare providers such as hospitals and digital health, payments and patient wellness. This first article looks at the implications of the disease treatments coming out of advanced research and artificial intelligence and the broader shift to digitalisation in healthcare. The next issue will focus on the providers of healthcare.

Monthly analysis: February

Where do you begin to summarise a year that has been the most challenging on a global scale in living memory?

Feature: artificial intelligence driving disease prevention, digital health enables personalised medicine, investment takes off

Sector analysis: Industrial

Innovative region: South Korea

Q&A with Itamar Sivan, the co-founder of Israel-based quantum computer orchestration technology developer Quantum Machines.

Nature’s laws of physics are difficult to replicate through an arrangement of binary computer switches, no matter how many of the switches we have access to.

Cloud servers can be thought of humanity’s first truly global infrastructure given they act as the bedrock for executing artificial intelligence (AI), or so went the argument in a November edition of The Economist.

DeepMind Technologies’ achievement of applying machine learning to predict 3D protein structures has certainly got the scientific world excited, with some experts hailing a massive step forward for medical research.