First in Human

Send a healthy 35-year-old into orbit and their bones start dissolving ten times faster than someone on Earth with osteoporosis. Their muscles waste. Their vision degrades. It turns out, space is a biological time machine - compressing decades of aging into months. And that means one thing: if you solve aging in orbit, you might have solved it on Earth. Matthew Kuhn is a 31-year-old biom...

Twenty-five million Americans have restless leg syndrome. For decades, the best available treatments were Parkinson's drugs - medications so problematic that three of four have now been pulled from standard of care guidelines. Patients describe the sensation as Coca-Cola running through their veins, an uncontrollable urge that steals sleep night after night. Some were told it was all in their head...

Toon Overbeeke's friend had a father going through chemotherapy — and every hospital visit meant failed attempt after failed attempt to draw his blood, because chemo had damaged his veins. The question was simple: isn't there a better way?  That question sent Toon — a mechanical engineer who'd left a partner-track career at Bain to ride a motorcycle 30,000 kilometers through Iran, Pakistan, a...

Patients with implantable cardiac defibrillators live with a brutal tradeoff: the device that saves their life can also shock them without warning — so hard they describe it as getting kicked by a horse. Many develop PTSD, anxiety, or depression. And until now, there's been no alternative. Allison Post is CEO of Rhythio Medical and a cardiovascular biomaterials engineer who spent years runnin...

If a foot wound isn't healing, the clock is already ticking. Every day in the United States alone, 500 people lose a limb to peripheral vascular disease - and 40% of them were never even diagnosed before the amputation. Jill Somerset spent over 20 years as a vascular ultrasound tech before a moment of curiosity altered the arc of her career: she put a probe on her own foot and what she discov...

In fifth grade, while other kids were drawing cars and airplanes, Andrew Ibrahim was flipping over his homework to sketch cities - mapping where the hospital should go, how far the school should be from the park, and deciding whether anyone would want to walk past a police station to get there. That obsession with putting pieces in the right place has shaped every chapter of his career since.&nbsp...

When you're building something new in healthcare, the instinct is to lock down requirements and ship fast. Eric Sugalski has spent his career proving why that's a mistake. Eric's journey started with a dream job at IDEO, where he fell in love with the messy, human-centered process of turning ideas into real products. He later went on to found his own design and development firm, spending fift...

A single FDA class at Stanford changed Allison Komiyama's life. She was a neuroscience PhD student who thought she'd end up in academia. Then she discovered regulatory science and never looked back. Allison spent time as an FDA device reviewer before moving to industry, where she built and sold her own regulatory consulting firm over seven years. Now, with her new venture Blue Stocking H...

Finding a lung nodule early is supposed to be good news. But for millions of patients, it means something terrifying: "We see something. We don't know what it is. Come back in six months." Joanna Nathan is the CEO of Prana Surgical, a company she spun out of Johnson & Johnson after the technology she'd watched develop one office over was about to be shelved. An immigrant entrepreneur...

What if diagnosing skin lesions didn’t require a scalpel — or even a biopsy at all? In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Gabriel Sanchez, MIT-trained engineer, Stanford PhD, and founder and CEO of Enspectra Health. Early in his engineering career at Stanford, Gabriel began to see the limits of powerful imaging technologies that never made it beyond the lab. Instead of letting th...

Menopause isn’t gentle. For many women, it’s a physiological shockwave — flipping sleep, mood, metabolism, cognition, sexual health, and long-term disease risk all at once. And all too often, the healthcare system’s response has essentially been: “live with it.” In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Mindy Goldman, a UCSF gynecologist and nationally recognized leader in menopause and cancer sur...

You might be surprised to learn that a particle physicist — someone who knows how to work with massive particle accelerators slamming atoms together — is building a company focused on a sticker that sits on your abdomen. But once you dig a bit deeper, it makes perfect sense. In this episode of First in Human, I talk with Steve Axelrod, a longtime physicist turned CEO, whose entire career has been...

What does it really take to decide what’s worth building in healthcare? In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Dr. Ryan Van Wert, ICU physician and serial health tech founder, to unpack how he’s built multiple companies by starting with the most vulnerable moments in medicine. From rethinking sedation for patients on ventilators, to ensuring people’s end-of-life wishes are honored...

It’s one thing to talk about innovation. It’s another to realize, mid-surgery, that nothing in the room was designed for your patient. In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Dr. James Wall, pediatric surgeon, serial health tech founder, and VP of Product Management and Associate Medical Officer at Intuitive, to trace his journey. It's a career that's been shaped by building where the m...

Sepsis is one of medicine’s most dangerous guessing games. Patients arrive with vague symptoms. Clinicians rely on instinct. And too often, the ones who look “okay” are the ones who crash. In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Dr. Tim Sweeney, physician-scientist and founder of Inflammatix, to trace the unlikely path from a tense moment at a medical conference to a breakthrough F...

What does it take to reinvent one of the most iconic tools in medicine? In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Connor Landgraf, co-founder and CEO of Eko Health, to trace the unlikely journey from childhood tinkerer to building a digital-enabled stethoscope that’s quietly reshaping how clinicians listen, learn, and diagnose. Connor shares how a gradual realization in a Berkel...

How do you fight a disease that hides until it’s almost too late? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Maria Artunduaga, founder of Samay, whose work began with a moment she still remembers clearly: a conversation about air trapping, a flashback to high-school physics, and the realization that sound might reveal early changes inside the lungs before symptoms appear at all. That spark - i...

An innovator’s first step into the clinical environment - in this case, an ICU built for the world’s tiniest babies - can change everything. In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Eric Chehab, a Stanford-trained biomechanical engineer and founder of Novonate. We explore how a deadly but unaddressed risk in premature newborns became the focus of his life’s work. Eric shares the mom...

Some problems in medicine see so many failed attempts that they start to feel untouchable. Teams learn to move on, investors grow wary, and the problem becomes its own warning label. Kate Garrett and Dr. Dan Azagury chose a different path. Kate and Dan, cofounders of Ciel (later acquired by Vyaire Medical), found themelves confronted with one of those notoriously unsolved, high-stakes problem...

What happens when a serial medtech founder takes on one of the most overlooked problems in public health: the simple act of finding a clean, safe place to go to the bathroom? In this episode, I sit down with Fletcher Wilson, founder and CEO of Throne Labs. His company is reimagining public bathrooms with the same precision and empathy you would expect from a medical device team. Fletcher shar...

What if medical education felt less like memorization, and more like discovery? In this episode of First in Human, we sit down with Shiv Gaglani, the founder of Osmosis, to unpack the story behind how a frustrated med student turned an idea into one of the most influential learning platforms in healthcare. Shiv shares the spark that started it all—the moment he realized medicine was being taught t...

What happens when two innovators take on a condition no one talks about - but that quietly shapes how people connect? In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Véronique Peiffer, PhD engineer, former McKinsey consultant, Stanford Biodesign fellowship alum, and co-founder of Palm. Together with her co-founder, she set out to solve excessive hand sweating, or hyperhidrosis - a conditio...

Ever wondered how to talk about your invention without your idea being stolen? In this episode of First in Human, we sit down with Jessica Hudak - mechanical engineer turned patent attorney and now VP of Corporate Counsel at Edwards Lifesciences = to unpack how innovators can safely move from idea to impact. You’ll hear Jessica’s journey from Stanford Biodesign to the Federal Circuit, and learn pr...

What happens when you combine clinical credibility, a patient problem that’s flown under the radar, and a founder mindset? In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Ben Thompson (Au. D.), founder of health-tech enabled telehealth startup Treble Health - and a YouTube creator whose tinnitus-focused videos have been viewed over 10 million times. Ben shares how he noticed an accessibili...

What happens when you bring Silicon Valley thinking into the operating room? In this episode of First in Human, host Dr. David Hindin sits down with Nick Damiano, co-founder and CEO of Andromeda Surgical, to explore how his team is building the world’s first autonomous surgical robot—a platform designed to make surgery safer, faster, and more precise. Nick shares his journey from pre-med at Stanfo...