Big Picture Medicine

Cyndi Williams is the Co-founder and CEO of Quin; a digital therapeutic for type 1 diabetes. The app provides personalised, data-led support for insulin dosing decisions, based on physiological and behavioural factors. Quin have raised £3.6 million pounds to date. We talk about the process of building Quin, the joys and tribulations of fundraising, crowdfunding and the life of a CEO. I hope you en...

Secrets, in Medicine, are a crime against humanity. Dr Marcus Baw holds an unusual career as a GP, Emergency Physician and health hacker. He makes a controversial claim: That we have an ethical duty to openly share our technological innovation — and anything short of this is a crime against humanity. Links from Marcus Digital Health Networks (CCIOs, CIOs, CSOs, Caldicott Guardians, Clinicians Who...

Professor Sir John Burn is Professor of Clinical Genetics at Newcastle University, a Non-Executive Director of NHS England and Vice Chairman of QuantumDx. His story is fascinating and slightly unusual — because he began life from humble beginnings in a small village in the North East of England. We talk about meritocracy, how to be a showman and why business and clinical academia are really very s...

What's the biggest existential threat to the BMJ? Dr Fiona Godlee is the Editor-in-Chief of the British Medical Journal and is an Executive Director of the BMJ Company. She trained as a General Physician in Cambridge and London, before joining the BMJ as an Editorial Registrar. Dr Godlee is incredibly interesting and forthcoming with the realities of running a medical journal — we talk about how t...

How do you capitalise on a problem spanning 5% of Google searches? Daniel Nathrath is the Co-founder and CEO of Ada Health; a self-assessment health app for patients. Ada has 10 million users, 250,000 5-star ratings and they’ve raised just shy of $100M. They’ve been backed by Philip Schindler (Google’s Chief Business Officer_ and William Tunstall-Pedoe; who created Amazon Alexa. We discuss some of...

How do you save the NHS £1 billion? Melissa Morris is founder and CEO of Lantum; a company aiming to save the NHS £1 billion in workforce costs. She started her career as a McKinsey Management Consultant and has since raised over £20M and grown Lantum to 60 employees. We talk about how she grew Lantum and got it adopted in the NHS, first principles, how to take advice, stress as a founder and I as...

Founding a company is like getting punched in the face, a lot. Adnan Iqbal is CEO and Co-Founder at Luma Health; a company which better connects patients and doctors. He’s raised over $30M and scaled to over 450 US health systems and clinics. Adnan studied Biology at Berkeley, then did his masters at Cambridge before working at Genentech — a large US biotech company. He then went to the Stanford G...

How can you become a superconnector? Will Gibbs leads the Future of Health team at Octopus Ventures; one of the largest Venture Capital firms in Europe — with over £1.3bn under management. Will studied Classic Archaeology and Ancient History at Oxford, before trying his hand at pig farming and then becoming an investor at Octopus. We talk about the pros and cons of being a doctorpreneur, being rig...

What does it mean to become addicted to failure? Dr Mala Mawkin is a Doctor, Head of Market Development at Cellen and hosts the Royal Society of Medicine’s Digital Health Podcast. She's also been featured on Forbes 30 under 30 and Vogue UK’s Top 10 Rising Female Stars — impressive — considering she graduated from Medical School just two years ago. We talk about persistence, chasing failure, leavin...

How can you use digital twins for faster clinical trials requiring fewer patients? Dr Charles Fisher is the CEO and Founder of Unlearn.ai — which uses digital twins to reduce the number of patients required in clinical trials. In a clinical trial, you usually have a treatment group who receive the drug/treatment, and a control group who receive a placebo. This means that a large number of patients...

What is VC and how do I raise it? Dr Benedict Evans was set on becoming an orthopaedic surgeon, before he fell out of love with Medicine and saw a system in which he could make a positive change, at scale. So he left his surgical training programme and joined McKinsey as a healthcare expert. He then worked as Associate Director of transformation at St Georges Hospital Trust in London before joinin...

What's the difference between UK and US medical training? Dr Ikram Haq trained at Imperial College Medical School, interning at McKinsey before starting training at the Mayo Clinic in the US — considered one of the best hospitals in the world. We talk about the difference between US and UK medical training, how Ikram got to where he is — covering both the high level philosophies and granular detai...

Can you automate therapy? Ross Harper studied both Neuroscience (Cambridge) and Mathematical Modelling (UCL) — combining the two into his lovechild: Limbic — an AI therapy assistant. We talk about the challenges of working in mental health, different business models in the area and how Ross sold his face to pay off his uni debt. I hope you enjoy. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subsc...

How do you make good decisions in health leadership? Professor Sam Shah is founder of the Faculty of Digital Health, Chief Medical Strategy Officer at Numan and former Director of Digital Development at NHS X. He has extensive experience in consulting, health policy and healthtech. We talk about good decision making in health leadership roles, how to make clinicians digitally proficient, and some...

How can you extend life? Professor Tom Kirkwood is Emeritus Professor at Newcastle University where he headed the Institute for Ageing and Health. He delivered the famous Reith Lectures and was awarded a CBE in 2009. Perhaps most famously he put forward the ‘Disposable Soma Hypothesis’ — which postulates that the body has a limited budget of resources and energy. It must therefore make a compromis...

What are the pros and cons of VC funding as a doctorpreneur? Dr Fiona Pathiraja was a Consultant Radiologist at UCLH and is now Founder and Managing Director of Crista Galli Ventures — a pan-European healthtech fund. She also holds an MBA and an MPH. We dive into her story, Venture Capital and she gives loads of valuable advice for doctorpreneurs.  I hope you enjoy. Crista Galli Ventures: htt...

So it's your first day as Health Secretary — what do you do!? Richard Sloggett was former Special Advisor to the Health Secretary (Matt Hancock) during which he worked across public health, the NHS and social care. He’s also Senior Fellow at the think tank Policy Exchange and has been named one of the 100 most influential people in healthcare policy by the Health Service Journal. Richard has also...

How can we use models to diagnose patients with rare diseases earlier? Rudy Benfredj is Co-founder and CEO of Mendelian ; who are helping doctors find and diagnose rare disease patients earlier. Rare diseases are individually rare, but collectively quite common — they affect 1 in 17 people. With 8000+ rare diseases and some only affecting a handful of people across the globe — rare diseases take a...

Professor Karl Friston is the most frequently cited neuroscientist in the world. Some of his most fascinating ideas centre around brain imaging, and of course, his infamous free energy principle — a grand unifying principle for cognitive science and biology. Professor Friston is incredibly insightful and patient with my questions — which at times feel like a 5 year old playing with a grand chess m...

What can you learn from studying the brains of London cabbies? Hugo Spiers is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL. He studies how we remember, navigate and imagine space. Some of his most interesting work has examined the brains of London cabbies who are required to learn the roads of London in painstaking detail. Now he leads the SeaHeroQuest project, in which his team are studying dementi...

Do you need to be a d**k to be a good leader? Here's what Dr Nadine said... Dr Nadine Hachach-Haram BEM is a plastic surgeon and CEO of Proximie — an augmented reality platform for virtual surgical collaboration. Rather than telemedicine it’s about telepresence. It means that a surgeon in the UK could open up their web browser, and see what another surgeon across the world is doing in real time an...

Do you need to be a d**k to be a good leader? Here's what Dr Eric Topol said... Dr Eric Topol is in the top 10 most cited doctors in the history of Medicine. He is a cardiologist, geneticist and digital medicine expert — and was commissioned by the UK’s Health Secretary to write a report to prepare the NHS for the digital future: The Topol Review. Dr Topol has three best selling books on the futur...

Look around and you’ll be surrounded by let’s face it... d**ks. Not just in politics and business — but also in Medicine. We’re taught lots about the multidisciplinary team and how important each member is — but that’s not always the experience in the real world. What I really want to know is: Do you need to be a d**k to be a good leader? And not just the knee jerk response of: " of course not" ....

Why switch from Investment Banking to Medicine? Dr Yusef Smith is a doctor, competitive gymnast and powerlifter. In a previous life, he was an investment banker before packing it in and training in Medicine. Whilst at Medical School he started Propane Fitness — the passive income from which has now overtaken his salary as a doctor. Yusef is a friend and one of the most contemplative people I know....

Stephen Bourke is the co-founder of Echo; the online pharmacy. If you haven’t heard of Echo, it’s a bit like Deliveroo for your medication. It delivers repeat prescriptions to your door, free of charge and hassle-free. It was acquired by McKesson, the group who own Lloyds Pharmacy in 2019. This is a really valuable conversation and Stephen is hilarious, honest and gives a tasty inside scoop into t...