Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Oral evidence: Innovation showcase, HC 523
Wednesday 19 November 2025
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 19 November 2025.
Members present: Dame Chi Onwurah (Chair); Emily Darlington; Dr Allison Gardner; Kit Malthouse; Samantha Niblett; Dr Lauren Sullivan; Adam Thompson; Freddie van Mierlo; Martin Wrigley; Daniel Zeichner.
Question 43
Witnesses
I: Dan Vahdat, Founder and CEO, and Dr Arvind Madan, Director, Huma Therapeutics.
Witnesses: Dan Vahdat and Dr Arvind Madan.
Chair: Good afternoon, and welcome to our innovation showcase. The Committee wants to understand how the UK supports innovators and what more can be done. To inform our work, every week a member of the Committee selects an innovator to share their story before our main evidence session. Today’s innovator has been selected by Kit Malthouse. Kit, will you introduce your innovator?
Q43 Kit Malthouse: Thank you, Chair. It is my great pleasure to introduce Dr Madan and Dan Vahdat. As I rove across the life-sciences landscape in my role as chair of the all-party group, often—almost daily—I come across miraculous developments in British ingenuity.
Dr Madan came to talk to me about the work of Huma. It struck me that it was a company that had positioned itself in a remarkably important area of healthcare. Over the last 10 years, if we think about it, almost all our financial lives have moved online and more and more of our retail lives are moving online. So we might expect the management of our health to start to move online, not just the monitoring we all do—for example, I wear a watch that tells me what I am doing—but our interaction with those who look after and treat us, and our interaction with and recording of what is injected into us or what we take.
These guys at Huma have built a system that allows the medical world effectively to build whatever it likes to allow the consumer to interact with their treatment and those who are treating them in a fantastic way. I had a demonstration—their office is just down the road in Millbank Tower, so if you want to go for a demo, please do. They will be able to explain it to you much more succinctly than I have. It strikes me as something we will all have on our phones at some point in the future. Over to you, Dan.
Dan Vahdat: Good afternoon. We stand in the middle of the greatest shift in healthcare since the inception of the NHS after the second world war. Today, with AI, some say that the third world war has already begun. Some nations are moving and winning, while some are hesitating and will become irrelevant. One question now decides our future: will the people of Great Britain lead this AI revolution or watch others lead it for us?
Thank you for inviting us. My name is Dan Vahdat, founder and CEO of Huma. We built Huma inside Oxford University, in small rooms in the Royal Free hospital, by the NHS and for the NHS. I did not start Huma just to build a big business; I started with a belief, a belief that this country, our country, should lead the world in digital, data and AI-first healthcare, not follow it.
Today, Huma is one of the very few healthtech unicorns, worth more than $1 billion worldwide. It is the only British-born platform company already working at a national scale across the United States, the middle east and Europe, yet wherever I go I hear one question: “Why does the NHS still struggle with problems that British companies such as Huma have already solved?”
Let me explain what we do. The Huma cloud platform is our foundation. It is a technology that allows anyone from health systems, Governments or healthcare providers to build the digital services that people deserve simply by typing what they need through a command or a prompt for a specific disease, condition or care pathway. By using our technology, you can build remote patient monitoring for different diseases; electronic medical records that are intelligent; AI triage; digital care pathways; population health management; clinical research data collection; and more. That is all in one place and all regulatorily cleared by the MHRA, the FDA and EU MDR class IIb.
The clearance matters, because it means that AI can now be deployed safely across the entire NHS, not as pilots or presentations but as regulated medical products used every day by millions of patients and clinicians. The world is moving fast, and the NHS cannot meet rising demand by utilising old, unintelligent technology. If the UK adopts the platform model, everything accelerates; you have lower costs, shorter waiting lists and a workforce lifted, not replaced, by technology.
Let me be frank that the economics are failing our people. Projects are delivered badly and budgets are burned carelessly, and taxpayers foot the bill. I have two examples; in my view, these are some of the UK’s greatest achievements, but they still show how serious the problem is. First, everything that the NHS app does today could have been delivered by a British company such as Huma for a fraction of the cost—in fact, it would have been five times cheaper.
Secondly, the federated data platform project, in which we have invested hundreds of millions of pounds, could have been built by a British company for probably one third of the cost. Sadly, most of that money did not stay in Britain—it went abroad to companies with no stake in our future—but the picture grows even darker. Look at the full NHS spend. We spend £4 billion to £6 billion a year on IT and software. That figure is an estimate, because the NHS does not publish the full breakdown, but the majority of it flows quietly beyond our shores.
Now, imagine a different choice. If only 30% of that spend had gone to British companies, it would mean £2 billion of revenue staying at home in this country. That £2 billion would become £30 billion of value creation for the UK economy through IPOs, jobs, taxes, discovery and intellectual property. Our domestic strengths become global strengths, and Britain becomes an exporter once again. In turn, that could unlock more than £300 billion of global value for Britain. Let us pause here: we are talking about more than 15% of FTSE 100 market cap combined. This is not theory; this is simple maths. It is a strategy, and it is sovereignty, and today the choice is ours.
What stands in our way? Too many people and too much politics are involved in every project. Non-British multinationals are lobbying hard—much harder than us—and we are not making decisions quickly enough. On the other hand, other nations are winning because they make strategic choices quickly. They treat healthtech as a sovereign capability, and the United Kingdom can do the same. I am not asking for subsidies or charity; I am asking for strategy.
Three actions can change everything. First, we can build a home-grown single national digital architecture—I could do that today. Secondly, British companies can be prioritised in areas of national importance—you are empowered to do that today. Thirdly, we can have a regulatory fast track for AI. Our MHRA is already great, and we need to support it even more.
We have the data, talent and capital to lead the world. Members of Parliament, history will not remember the Committees; it will remember the decisions we make today. We can build the future of healthcare here in Britain, with British minds, British hands and British resolve. We can lead the way, or we can watch others build the future for us and we—the people of Great Britain—will lose the AI game forever. The choice is ours, but the price of hesitation will be paid by every patient, every family and every life we could have saved but did not. I look forward to your questions.
Chair: Thank you very much, Mr Vahdat. We do not ask questions at this point, but that was a really inspiring call to arms and call to action. I know that it struck a chord with everyone on the Committee. In particular, we will want to follow up on assessing the NHS’s procurement contribution to British start-ups and scale-ups. The points that you make are relevant to our inquiries into life sciences investment and into regional innovation and growth. Thank you very much for joining us today. We are very impressed by your call to action.
Dan Vahdat: Thank you so much. We really appreciate the opportunity. It was an honour.