Big Picture Medicine

Hamish Grierson is the CEO and Co-founder of Thriva, a company which offers direct to consumer blood testing — with a broader mission of increasing healthspan — the number of years people spend in good health. For under £100 you can order a test kit, prick your finger at home and mail the blood sample back. This is then reviewed by a GP. In effect, they’re treating people like adults who can take...

Dr Stephen Reeders founded MVM Partners in 1997. They invest in high growth businesses with bases in London and Boston. He’s had three different lives— Firstly he obtained a BA in Natural Sciences from Cambridge, before getting his Medical Degree from Oxford and then training as a Doctor in some of the UK’s premier institutes such as John Radcliffe, Guys and Queen Square. In part II, he became a C...

Dr Vishaal Virani is Head of UK Health at YouTube. He started his career as an NHS doctor, before moving to healthcare strategy consulting. He then worked at Ada Health as Business Development and Client Success Director, before becoming Global Digital Innovation Manager at Reckitt. Along the way he co-founded Doctorpreneurs which was one of the first and largest networks of doctor entrepreneurs....

Mehdi Yacoubi is Co-Founder and CEO of Vital — where they are building the Strava for Health. Essentially a service which incorporates data from wearables (your HRV, your glucose levels, your sleep) and pulls these altogether into a community, also providing clear analytics and recommendations — ultimately transforming how we think about our own health. In 2021, Vital raised an undisclosed amount...

Deena Shakir is a Partner at Lux Capital where she likes to invest in underdog entrepreneurs building breakthrough companies to accelerate advances and equity in human and population health. She’s led investments into companies like Maven Health; a unicorn in women’s and family health and SteadyMD; a telehealth company. She has a very interesting background. She studied at Harvard and Georgetown’s...

Dr David Albert is a physician, inventor and serial entrepreneur. He studied at both Harvard and Duke University Medical School. In 2001, he sold Data Critical to GE in a deal that valued Data Critical at $45M. Perhaps his Magnum Opus: AliveCor has raised over $150M and creates devices which are able to take ECGs or heart traces — from anywhere, at anytime. It’s newest innovation: The KardiaMobile...

Dr Susan Thomas trained as a Geriatrician, before joining Ernst and Young — eventually becoming Health and Sciences Lead Partner. In 2021 she left to become Clinical Director of Google Health UK. We speak about her decision to leave a very lucrative and established role at EY to join Google Health, things she still misses about practicing Medicine, her approach to leadership and whether life gets...

Dr Michael Cantor studied both Law and Medicine at the University of Illinois, before completing his Residency at Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Hospital. He is a Geriatrician and has a very interesting career, being the Chief Medical Officer of both Uber Health and Intuition Robotics. We talk about Uber’s role in the future of healthcare, the gig economy and hardcore free market economics a...

Dr Claire Novorol trained as a Specialist Registrar in London before completing a PhD in Developmental Neurobiology at the University of Cambridge. With 18 months left until becoming a Consultant, she left Medicine to co-found Ada Health — an AI powered self-assessment health tool. Ada has raised $190 million dollars to date with over 10 million users. We speak about her decision to leave Medicine...

Peony Li is Founder and CEO at Jude — a company bringing bladder care into the mainstream. She studied Economics at Cambridge, and has worked in Investment Banking, she worked as Head of Investments at Founders Factory, at Daye as Head of Operations before finally founding Jude and raising $2.5M. We talk about the rosy picture of entrepreneurship versus the harsh reality, what it’s like to be a fo...

Dr Dafydd Loughran trained as a surgeon, before joining Babylon Health as an AI Clinician and then founding Concentric Health. Concentric is digitising the consenting of patients prior to surgery. Essentially, bringing traditional paper consent forms into the 21st century. It started as a surgical consent aide-mémoire which Daf made as a Junior Doctor. He has since raised over $1M and Concentric h...

Dr Keith Grimes is Clinical Digital Health & Innovation Director at Babylon Health — essentially, he teaches machines medicine. He’s also a General Practitioner with a special interest in Digital Health & Urgent Care, as well as founder of VR Doctors. We talk about how to get into digital health as a doctor, the importance and unimportance of credentialism in the field, virtual reality and...

Herman Pontzer is an Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University. He studies how our species’ deep past shapes our health and physiology today. He is the author of Burn: New Science Reveals How Metabolism Shapes Your Body, Health, and Longevity . In his book, he follows the Hadza community — a group of people who live in Tanzania and are relatively untouched by the modern s...

Dr Imran Mahmud studied Medicine at Oxford, before studying Public Health at Harvard on a Fulbright Scholarship. He then ranked first in the country and entered the Ophthalmology training programme which he then promptly left, joining McKinsey. In 2018 he co-founded NYE Health, raising over £4M. He is now a startup advisor, angel investor and consultant on digital health topics. We speak about lea...

Dr Andrew Vallance-Owen MBE was the Chief Medical Officer of Bupa between 1995–2012. He led work to bring patient reported outcomes into vogue in both the private and public sectors — and he was awarded an MBE in the 2014 Queen’s Birthday Honours. He now has a number of non-executive roles in healthcare, including as Chief Medical Officer of Medicover and on the boards of startups such as Testcard...

Dr Rebecca Pope is the UK Digital & Data Science Innovation Lead at Roche, Senior Research Fellow in AI applied to real healthcare problems at UCL and a Clinical Neuroscientist. She was previously UK Director of Data Science & AI for KPMG and has been voted the Most Influential Woman in UK Tech. Her writing also regularly appears in the Guardian and the Times . We speak about what she lear...

Dr Michael Moor is a medical doctor doing his PhD in the Machine Learning and Computational Biology Lab at ETH Zurich. Some of his most interesting research looks at predicting sepsis using machine learning approaches. In case you’re unfamiliar, sepsis is a life threatening condition in which the body’s natural defences against an infection go into overdrive. Mortality from septic shock can be up...

Dr Patrick Carroll is the Chief Medical Officer of Hims & Hers — a US Telehealth company which he helped go public in a $1.6 billion dollar SPAC deal. Hims & Hers focuses on many taboo health issues such as sexual health issues, hair loss and mental health. Dr Carroll graduated from Dartmouth Medical School and was previously CMO of Walgreens. We talk about how he got to where he is, what...

Dr Christopher Kelly is a Senior Research Scientist at Google and a Neonatal Intensive Care Doctor in London. He founded CK Net whilst at Medical School at Cambridge — which was generating £60M in sales for its clients the year before it was acquired as well as founding GettingMarried.co.uk — which was acquired by Prezola in 2016. He is also an Angel Investor, having invested in tech startups such...

What does it take to leave Syria during the Civil War and become the first Syrian Rhodes Scholar? Dr Alexey Youssef trained in Medicine in Syria — where he practiced during the Civil War, during which the hospital he worked in was bombed. He then became the first Syrian to gain the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University and then started his PhD in Clinical AI. He has now started his M...

How can we design AI systems which remove human bias — rather than perpetuate it? Ziad Obermeyer is Associate Professor and Blue Cross of California Distinguished Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Berkeley School of Public Health where he researchers and teaches on the intersection of machine learning and healthcare. Some of his most interesting research focuses on algorithmic bias,...

What does it take to become a great clinical academic? Neil Sebire is a Professor of Pathology at the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) which is the country’s leading children’s research hospital as well as the Chief Clinical Data Officer at Health Data Research UK He has loads and loads of other accolades including over 700 published papers, a H index of 88 and 32,000 citations so it’s always a...

Yusuf Sherwani is the Co-founder and CEO of QuitGenius — a digital clinic for addiction. QuitGenius started life as a smoking cessation app, which Yusuf and his Co-founders created whilst at Imperial College Medical School. They have since expanded to the US and have raised just under $80M dollars. We talk about the overnight success, and how it wasn’t really overnight. We talk a lot about decisio...

Dr Ann Taylor studied at Harvard Medical School, practiced as an Endocrinologist at Mass General Hospital before shifting over to Pharma — now sitting as AstraZeneca’s Chief Medical Officer. This episode's full of wisdom, we talk about being a generalist vs a specialist at life, what she learned from leaving Medicine and entering Pharma and her tips for medics who want to do great things outside o...

Colin Espie is Professor of Sleep Medicine at Oxford University as well as Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Big Health. With insomnia, there are two mainstays of treatment. The first is medication or drugs, and the second is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (or CBT). CBT has traditionally required face-to-face treatment from a psychologist, and can be difficult to access for patients in a cons...