Chess Howard, founder and CEO of Vita Panacea, took an unconventional path into healthtech. She started her career on Wall Street in reinsurance at 18 and spent over 14 years in the Lloyd’s of London market, advising healthcare and life sciences companies on risk and structuring complex insurance programs. Her clients included drug and device developers, pharmacies, hospitals, and clinics, giving her a broad understanding of the healthcare chain.
Howard’s experience in the Lloyd’s market taught her about the weaknesses in health technology, including why connected devices fail in the field and where liability lies when a treatment goes wrong. By 30, she was heading a Healthcare and Life Sciences division in the Lloyd’s market and was a finalist for the BIBA Young Broker of the Year award in 2022.
Filling Healthcare Gaps
One significant blind spot Howard encountered was the lack of recording what happens to a medicine once it reaches the patient. In 2025, she founded Vita Panacea to address this issue, developing Nexus, a connected medication management system. Nexus is currently undergoing UK medical device registration, with patent applications filed in the UK, US, and internationally.
Nexus is a connected medication management ecosystem consisting of hardware, software, and a replenishment service designed around the patient. The system includes three Med Pods: Air for ambient medicines, Cryo for cold-chain injectables, and Edge for sharps. Patients use the pods that fit their treatment needs, and each pod records adherence, logging every dose taken and storage reading.
The Nexus app builds the schedule and reminders from the patient’s treatment plan, converting instructions into plain language and pictograms. It also flags expiry dates, keeps the record, and has the MHRA’s Yellow Card scheme built-in, allowing patients to report side effects. Clinicians and care teams can access the patient’s record through a clinician portal, while pharmacies connect through their own portal via Nexus Replenish, the replenishment service.
Howard’s personal experiences, including caring for her grandparents with dementia and being a patient herself after a skiing accident, shaped the development of Nexus. She saw the daily labor of medication management and the need for a system that makes managing medication easier without adding complexity to patients’ lives.
Nexus combines connected hardware, software, and a repeat-prescription service to make medication storage and management more visible to clinicians and care teams. The system is designed to capture the record automatically, act on it without being asked, and reorder before the box is empty. This approach could improve patient safety, treatment decisions, and accountability when something goes wrong.
Rise of Complex Treatments
According to Howard, the most expensive part of a medicine’s journey is now the part with the least information, and that part is growing fastest. Chronic disease is rising, and treatments are becoming more complex, with many depending on an unbroken cold chain. However, these treatments are often kept in kitchen fridges, handbags, and hotel rooms, highlighting the need for a system like Nexus.
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Howard believes that taking the remembering away from the patient altogether is the efficient answer to improving medication adherence. Nexus is designed to make medication management easier, with the app building the schedule from the clinician’s treatment plan and the pods recording storage and doses by themselves. The replenishment service reorders, collects, and confirms without the patient having to remember any of it.
Nexus is designed to make medication storage and management more visible to clinicians and care teams, which could improve patient safety, treatment decisions, and accountability. With Nexus, a missed dose or a cold-chain breach is seen when it happens, rather than surfacing at the next appointment. The system also allows a patient under multidisciplinary care to have every clinician on the team working from the same record.
The link between patient, clinician, care team, and pharmacy is critical, as a supply problem at the pharmacy can be caught before it becomes a missed dose at home. For treatment decisions, the clinician can make informed decisions based on evidence, seeing whether the treatment was taken and stored as intended. For accountability, a consented, time-stamped record protects everyone when something goes wrong.
Howard’s experience in insurance and risk management has been valuable in building Vita Panacea. She learned that the most expensive risks are the ones nobody measured and that sequencing is critical, with hard questions on liability, regulation, and evidence asked before a product reaches the market. Borders also matter, and Nexus was designed with UK, EU, and US regulation in view from the beginning.
Overcoming Industry Challenges
As a woman founder developing a medtech product, Howard has faced challenges in taking Nexus from concept to a product preparing for regulatory approval and launch. She had to earn credibility prototype by prototype, as building a physical device without an engineering background is a significant undertaking. Research shows that investors ask male founders about the upside and female founders about the downside, and Howard has had to deal with these biases.
Despite these challenges, Howard is moving forward with Vita Panacea, with the next 12 months focused on proof. The company will continue to grow its clinical advisory board and partner with hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and organizations across the sector. Success will look different to each of the people Nexus is built for, but for a patient, it would mean staying on a treatment they were struggling with and living without their medication deciding what they can do.
One of the key features of Nexus is its ability to provide a single record for clinicians and care teams, allowing them to work from the same information. The system also allows for real-time monitoring of medication adherence, enabling clinicians to intervene early if a patient is struggling with their treatment.
According to the Health Foundation, nearly one in five adults in England will be living with a major illness by 2040, up more than a third on 2019. Diabetes is among the conditions driving this rise, with more than 4.7 million people in the UK already diagnosed with it. Many of the fastest-growing treatments for long-term conditions are injections rather than tablets, including insulin and GLP-1s for diabetes and obesity.
