Medical Technology UK

Centre for Process Innovation Ltd (CPI), an independent deep tech innovation centre part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, has appointed Rahul Kapoor as its first HealthTech Director.
Rahul brings a wealth of commercial HealthTech experience from his previous roles at Johnson & Johnson, Janssen, Unilever, and digital health SME, Medic Spot Ltd. Rahul is an alumnus of London Business School and the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Under Rahul's leadership, CPI aims to build on its success to date in supporting companies to commercialise innovative health technologies. The appointment marks CPI's purposeful shift toward HealthTech and reinforces the organisation's commitment to improving global population health and the cost-effectiveness of health and social care through innovation, both nationally and globally.

UK HealthTech: an exciting and resilient market
According to the Office of Life Sciences, the health technology sector's turnover was £25.6 billion in 2019, and since 2016 investment in the sector has grown nine-fold. Medical technologies also account for the highest percentage of patent applications filed with the European Patent Office.

With the growing global population causing spiralling healthcare costs unmatched by economic growth, there is an increasing need to develop smart, cost-effective new approaches for diagnosing, treating, and managing health and well-being to help people live happier and healthier lives.

CPI aims to accelerate the thriving HealthTech ecosystem
CPI works with and connects actors from across the HealthTech ecosystem - from start-ups, SMEs and large corporations, to investors, government, regulators, and industry bodies - to significantly speed up the new product development journey through access to funding, investment, and support with regulation, product design, and clinical trials.

Offering multi-disciplinary innovation development and scale-up capabilities much-needed by the HealthTech sector - including digital, electronics, photonics, formulation, nanotechnologies, materials, biotechnology, and biologics - CPI works closely with its partners to address innovation gaps by developing and scaling-up components and sub-systems making up HealthTech products.

CPI has already worked with over 160 clients and partners to support end-to-end product and process innovation for developing medical devices, wearables, digital medical systems, and in vitro diagnostics, including:

• Delivering the Health Technology Regulatory Innovation Programme with Innovate UK and ABHI to provide HealthTech SMEs with £7m to help navigate regulatory processes;
  
• Working with Northumberland-based Floki Health Limited to develop a smart flexible asset tracking label, which can track medical equipment within a hospital or care home environment, and ultimately reduce costs to the NHS;
  
• And helping start-up CLEWS Medical Limited to prototype a wireless device that tracks a patient's early warning scores to enable faster and better medical intervention.
  

New leadership
Rahul will lead the transformation of CPI's role in HealthTech to boost partnerships across the value-chain, and ensure the sector benefits from CPI's services and expansive scale-up capabilities to provide system-wide solutions to the product design, development, clinical validation, and adoption of novel health technologies.

As the new HealthTech Director at CPI, Rahul Kapoor commented: "Healthcare is so personal to us all. By providing the right tools and resources, new health technology innovations can help all of us live better lives. CPI has both the vision and the cutting-edge technologies needed to help tech-led businesses bring their ideas to life.

"Ultimately, we want to bring HealthTech innovations to market earlier, so that healthcare systems can deliver better outcomes for everyone. I am excited to bring all of my experience together to expand CPI's impressive HealthTech offer and support novel innovations that will help to build a resilient healthcare system for the future."

Dr Arun Harish, Strategy Director at CPI, said: "CPI has set itself the challenge of improving global health and bringing down the cost of healthcare through innovation. As we focus on speeding up product development and boosting disruptive innovation, Rahul's appointment is a key part of our journey towards becoming a globally recognised innovation organisation with unique and cutting-edge HealthTech capabilities."