Ms Giovanna Forte

Giovanna co-founded Forte Medical with her brother Dr Vincent Forte, now retired NHS GP. She brought his innovation Peezy Midstream to market starting with the prototype in 2009, which was quickly adopted by private healthcare providers. Rigorous regulatory and quality assurance standards, clinical and user trials have produced excellent real-world evidence with Peezy Midstream reducing specimen contamination to as low as 0% from national average of 20-30%. The outcome is reduced retests, repeat appointments and lower unnecessary antibiotic prescribing helping to take women away from the AMR frontline. It generates significant savings for point of care, laboratory and GP services. Peezy Midstrteam is available through Una Health, our female-founded, female focused sales and distribution partner. Two new devices are in the pipeline: • Peezy First Stream, collecting the first 8-10ml of urine for early detection of certain cancers such as bladder, prostate, lung and pancreas; • Peezy Twin Stream, collecting two specimens from the same stream for transformed sports dope testing, evidential forensic medicine and some STI detection All devices will benefit from development into flat-pack systems to serve the @home and remote testing businesses for whom specimen accuracy will deliver reliable, gold-standard results. Giovanna enjoys regular speaking invitations, which have included lectures with students of healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship at Imperial College, Imperial Business School and clinical presentations at industry events such as the AMR Action UK annual conference and the global Patient Centric Sampling Interest Group. She has often spoken at schools, aiming to inspire entrepreneurship within the next generation.