CEO's greetings

Dear reader,

A year ago, I wrote in this report that healthcare is at a turning point: its focus must shift from treating diseases to preventing them. I described the operating logic that prevention needs: detect disease risks early, prevent the onset of disease, measure the change in risk, and fund what works. That case has not changed. What has changed is where the shift is now most visible. Consumer technology companies have made preventative health their next big market. The world's largest technology companies and the fastest-growing health platforms are building products for people who want to stay healthy.

The health platforms they have built share the same design. They combine sensor data from a watch, a ring or a wristband with other digital data and an AI coach. The result is one picture of a person's health, with daily guidance. They do this very well, and they have a reach that healthcare does not: healthcare typically sees a person a few times a year, whereas these platforms reach their users every day.

Blood is the newest data layer in these platforms. Since early 2025, one health platform after another has added a blood test to its service, and for a good reason. Sensors show a person's behaviour and vital signs. Blood shows what is happening inside the body. A picture of health without blood data is incomplete.

Today these blood tests come from large clinical laboratories. The business of such a laboratory is to sell the same standard blood values to every customer. This serves disease treatment well, because these laboratories were built for diagnosing disease. But standard blood values are available from any laboratory, so the blood data sets no platform apart: whatever one platform offers its users today, the next can buy the same values tomorrow.

There is a second limitation. A blood value is not a disease risk. What people want to know is their risk of disease and whether their daily actions reduce it. Risk models built on standard blood values already exist and are valuable: they are the risk calculators used in healthcare today. But any platform can compute them from the same blood values and a few additional inputs, so they set no platform apart either. They also have limits of their own. They were designed when risk assessment relied on questionnaires and a few standard blood values, and part of their input is subjective or situation-dependent, such as blood pressure, BMI and family history. This limits how reliably a change in risk can be followed over time. And because they do not use the broader molecular information in the blood, they miss people who are at high risk, as an independent University of Cambridge study published in the European Heart Journal showed in 2025. Reliable risk monitoring needs a method that is objective, repeatable and the same everywhere.

Better risk detection needs information that standard blood values do not contain. That information is in the same blood sample, in a broader molecular measurement: fatty acids, amino acids, inflammation and the detailed composition of lipoproteins. AI models cannot substitute for real biological information: a model cannot create information that the measurement did not capture.  

Turning such a measurement into validated disease risk is a task that must be built from end to end. A company must develop the measurement technology and measure biobank samples with it. It must test the risk models against what actually happened to those people over more than ten years. It must deliver the same result in every laboratory and win approval for use in healthcare. I am not aware of any laboratory supplying the platforms today that has this end-to-end capability, and the capability is not for sale on the open market. It has to be built.

Nightingale Health has built the whole package over more than ten years. Our measurement technology captures the molecular information that standard blood values leave out. Our risk models were built on samples from some of the world's largest biobanks, including UK Biobank. They were tested against real disease outcomes in cohorts of hundreds of thousands of people and replicated in independent cohorts.  

The models have been shown to identify high-risk individuals missed by current screening tools. In the Cambridge study, adding our test to the standard European risk calculator, SCORE2, reclassified 9% of people as high risk. Giving them routine cholesterol-lowering treatment would prevent 44% more heart attacks and strokes, without increasing the number of people treated for each event prevented. When the test is repeated, it shows whether a person's risk is going down.

We run the measurement in our own laboratories on three continents, and our test is approved for healthcare use in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Japan and Singapore. In Finland it is in nationwide healthcare use, and more than 250,000 people have already received their results. To my knowledge, no other company in the world has all of these together.

This is the company we are building: a foundation of molecular-level data on which better preventative health services can be built. Our technology can serve a national healthcare system, a private healthcare provider, an occupational health service or a consumer health platform. Each of them can combine the validated disease risks and the blood values produced by Nightingale Health with its own service, its other user data and its AI.

We make this available globally, to healthcare providers and health platforms. The difference from a clinical laboratory is twofold. First, the customer receives not only blood values, but validated disease risk. With it, a service can do what standard blood values and the calculators built on them cannot: find the people at high risk who would otherwise be missed, and show its users the direction in which their risk is developing. Second, the customer receives the same result everywhere. Standard blood values from different laboratories are not directly comparable, because clinical chemistry varies between reagents, instruments and laboratories. We run one measurement, with one technology, in our own laboratories on three continents, so a platform or provider can offer its users the same test with comparable results in every market where it is approved for healthcare use.

This is why I believe the next 24 months will be critical. During that time it will become clear which health platforms offer their users validated disease risk and which continue to offer standard blood values. Platforms that add validated disease risk early will have a longer measurement history for their users and more time to build their products around reducing their users’ disease risk.  

At the same time, our own plan does not depend on any single platform or channel. It rests on healthcare providers, public healthcare and occupational health, where our test is in use today. The consumer platforms are a new market in addition to these.

Our goal is to make preventative healthcare accessible to everyone. The technology now exists, it is approved, and it works at national scale. The consumer technology companies have shown that people want to take care of their health and are ready to pay for it. When validated disease risk becomes part of the products people already use every day, risk detection reaches a scale that healthcare alone has not reached. Many more people can then act on their risk before disease develops. That is the future we are building, and I believe we are closer to it than ever.

Teemu Suna
CEO and Founder, Nightingale Health Plc