Vital Health Podcast

Trials@Home is a €39 million, pan-European public private partnership of the EU’s Innovative Medicines Initiative, focused on defining the best practices to conduct decentralised clinical trials (DCTs). In this Vital Health Podcast, Duane Schulthess speaks with Kim Hawkins, Global Head of Clinical Project Operations at Sanofi, and the Co-Project Lead of the Trials@Home consortium. Kim outlines how...

Douglas Holtz-Eakin was formerly a professor of economics at Syracuse University and served as the director of the Congressional Budget Office from 2003 – 2005. He was the chief economic policy adviser to Senator John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign and is currently president of the American Action Forum, a highly respected think tank in Washington, DC. While heading the CBO, Douglas played a...

John LaMattina was President of Pfizer Global Research and Development and ran an international team of over 13,000 scientists and professionals. He has authored several books, including the highly acclaimed Pharma and Profits – Balancing Innovation, Medicine, and Drug Prices . He is also a senior partner at PureTech Health and a contributor to Forbes. Last year, when John was a guest on the Vital...

This podcast features Kate Hudson, the Associate Vice President and Counsel for Policy at the Association of American Universities, and Joseph P. Allen, the Executive Director of the Bayh-Dole Coalition. They discuss the unintended consequences that the Biden Administration’s Draft Interagency Guidance Framework for Considering the Exercise of March-In Rights in the Bayh-Dole Act is having on smal...

On December 8, 2023, The Biden Administration under the National Institute of Standards and Technology (“NIST”) released a Draft Interagency Guidance Framework for Considering the Exercise of March-In Rights in the Bayh-Dole Act. VT’s Grumpy Old Men are back to discuss what this means to R&D. Vital Transformation released our report,  March-in rights under the Bayh-Dole Act & NIH contribut...

With a six million EUR funding grant from the European Commission, the PRIME-ROSE project will implement, across Europe, a series of prospective, non-randomized clinical trials known as DRUP trials. DRUP trials started in the Netherlands and have successfully increased inclusion rates to offer additional lines of treatment to patients. On this Vital Health Podcast, Duane Schulthess speaks to PRIME...

In this Vital Health Podcast, Duane Schulthess speaks with Peter Kolchinsky, Managing Partner at RA Capital Management. Peter has authored several critically acclaimed books, including  The Great American Drug Deal  and  The Entrepreneur’s Guide to a Biotech Startup . Peter also serves as the Director of No Patient Left Behind, a non-profit organization. Peter outlines that not only are IRA’s prov...

Christian Schneider is the Chief Medical Officer of Biopharma Excellence, and was formerly the Chief Scientific Officer at the UK’s MHRA. He was the Medical Head for Licensing at the Danish Medicines Agency, and a member of the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) of the European Medicines Agency. In this podcast, we discuss the continuing challenges to Europe’s Biopharma competit...

On this Vital Health Podcast, Duane Schulthess has a conversation with Bettina Ryll, the founder of the Melanoma Patient Network Europe. Bettina is regarded as one of the world’s leading Patient Advocates, who dedicated herself to advocacy after the death of her husband from cancer.   While most patient representatives don’t have a medical background, Bettina has a Ph. D. in Biomedical Sciences fr...

Dan is the newly appointed Executive Director of We Work For Health, bringing more than two decades of experience in advocacy, policy, and public affairs to this role. He previously headed the Association for Accessible Medicines (AAM) and the National Pharmaceutical Council (NPC).   In this podcast, we discuss the ten drugs selected for negotiation under the IRA and their unintended consequences...

In this Vital Health Podcast, we’re speaking with Steve Potts before his congressional testimony for the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Steve presented evidence regarding the negative impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act on U.S. venture capital investors, the development of small molecules, and the needed therapies that will most likely be lost to patients over the next ten years. ...

In this vital health podcast, we’re speaking with Amy M. Miller, the recently appointed President of the PhRMA Foundation. Amy has held nonprofit leadership roles for nearly 20 years in DC, including President and CEO of the Society for Women’s Health Research and Executive Vice President of the Personalized Medicine Coalition. The PhRMA Foundation catalyzes the careers of promising researchers th...

The U.S. Congress and Biden Administration’s attacks on IP and Drug Pricing continue unabated as the 2024 election approaches. In this Vital Health Podcast, VT’s Grumpy Old Men (Duane Schulthess, Joe Hammang, and Harry P. Bowen) are particularly grumpy about the current state of affairs and dig into their research findings on the Inflation Reduction Act. They also ruminate on what the continued ra...

In this Vital Health Podcast, Duane Schulthess speaks with Rachel King, the Interim CEO of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), who is steering the organization through the increasingly choppy waters of the DC drug pricing debate. With mounting regulatory pressure from all angles towards the global biopharma sector, Washington DC’s BIO sits at the center of the tempest. Rachel King com...

In this  Best-Of edition of the Vital Health Podcast, we’re looking back on the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and discussions we had with statistician Miriam Sturkenboom and Ivor Cummings, both of whom, in very different ways, were at the center of COVID-19 as to the appropriate response to the pandemic. Miriam Sturkenboom, who’s vaccine safety monitoring platform VAC4EU, found herself at the...

In this Best-Of edition of the Vital Health Podcast, we're looking back on the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and conversations with Epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, and Political Scientist Wilfred Reilly.  By spring of 2020, there were already serious questions being asked about COVID-19 policies, and both men were expressing skepticism of the political approaches being advocated by governmen...

In this Vital Health Podcast, Duane Schulthess speaks with John Dwyer. John is a serial entrepreneur, having successfully built and sold two healthcare start-ups to 3M and Aetna. He’s now a key player in The Global CEO Initiative on Alzheimer’s Disease, and also serves an active role in the patient advocacy organization U.S. Against Alzheimer’s. John outlines the continued controversy surrounding...

With the Inflation Reduction Act now law, there are mounting concerns that its drug pricing revisions will have a huge negative impact on the California Biotech ecosystem, arguably, the globe’s leading hub for innovative biotech. Joseph Panetta is President & CEO of Biocom, the San Diego, California organization leading 1200 companies, service sector firms, universities and research institutes...

Amitabh Chandra is the director of health policy research at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Dr Chandra is a rare voice sounding an alarm about the unintended consequences of the drug pricing provisions of the inflation reduction act.   In this Vital Health Podcast, Amitabh highlights the enormous disincentives for sm...

In this Vital Health Podcast, we speak with Debbie Hart, President & CEO of BioNJ about the direct impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act upon her members. Under Debbie’s leadership, BioNJ has earned the reputation as the trusted voice of the life sciences industry in New Jersey. Most recently, she was named by Governor Murphy as the new Chair of the New Jersey Commission on Science, Innovatio...

A Boston Success story, Rhythm Pharmaceuticals brought to market an innovative orphan therapy treating an extremely rare genetic disorder which causes hyperphagia, a pathological hunger that leads to abnormal food-seeking behaviors, and severe obesity. In this Vital Health Podcast, we have a conversation with Dr. Meeker, the Chairman, President & CEO of Rhythm Pharmaceuticals, who was also for...

This Vital Health Podcast was recorded at the BIO international Conference on the afternoon of the release of Vital Transformation’s research study outlining the impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act on U.S. biopharma innovation. It features Duane Schulthess, Nick Shipley, the Executive Vice President of BIO, and Joe Hammang, Vital Transformation’s U.S. Business Director. The podcast provides an...

Nikolai Brun is a rare regulator who has rolled up his sleeves and successfully helped bring a therapy to market. He was part of a team at Genmab that discovered one of the first monoclonal antibodies for treating cancer.  Nikolai was previously the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) of the Danish Medicines Agency, and has recently gone back into industry, as the CMO of the Swedish biotech company, Affib...

The Quality Adjusted Life Year, or QALY, was invented at the UK’s University of York by Prof Alan Williams in the 1970s. Some currently engaged in the bitter trench warfare of America’s drug pricing debate think it’s high time for another British invasion, and the US should fully embrace the UK’s use of QALYs. In this Vital Health Podcast, we have a discussion with William Smith, a Senior Fellow a...

Andrew Roddam is the CEO of Our Future Health, the UK’s largest ever health research programme. The objective of Our Future Health is to bring together up to five million people linking healthcare and genomic information to develop new ways to prevent, detect and treat diseases. Andrew Roddam is an internationally renowned epidemiologist. He started his career at University of Oxford and found his...