Peter Gabriel has been inspired by his wife’s successful cancer treatment to create a medical streaming service.
The 68-year-old musician is delighted that his spouse Meabh is now "remarkably well" 18 months after developing an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma thanks to a pioneering genetic cell treatment.
Meabh, 47, had undergone unsuccessful intensive chemotherapy before she and her husband searched online for new treatments and came across Dr William and Vincent Li, of The Angiogenesis Foundation, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who suggested CAR T-Cell therapy, where the costume designer’s immune cells would be genetically engineered to fight the disease, and it was completely cleared in just a single infusion.
As a result of the successful treatment, the Genesis star has teamed up with the medical experts to create The Tap, a health platform that would bring together all the latest technology from thousands of different companies to monitor health or treat conditions such as stroke, cancer, cardiovascular disease, or kidney stones at home.
Speaking about his wife’s illness for the first time at the Unite to Cure Fourth Vatican International Conference in Vatican City, he said: "My wife got sick about 18 months ago, with a very aggressive form of non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and we were very lucky because we knew Vince and Will Li and they led us through the maze that is cancer and eventually CAR-T and now she is remarkably well.
"We are enormously grateful for all the science and research that went into that, but it is being marketed at around £1 million dollars a head and we spent a lot of time in the hospitals thinking, ‘Well is there anything we can do to make a difference there?’.
"My dad was an inventor so one of the things that got us interested when music turned into digits was to try and get a platform that would allow anyone to get any music and we created a thing called OD2 in 1999, four years before ITunes which became Nokia Music.
"The idea is to create a similar platform that would allow new types of medicine to be streamed to the home so that the home becomes the treatment centre. Streamed medicine is about to hit, so lets accelerate it and make sure the experts start talking to each other so it’s all in one place."
The ‘Sledgehammer’ hitmaker urged the doctors and scientists attending the conference to come together to be a part of the platform.
He cried as he said: "You’re doing amazing work here. In the same way that your work saved the woman I love, a lot of what you do will save a lot more people if you can get it to talk together."
Peter Gabriel to launch medical streaming service
