Big Picture Medicine: Recent Episodes
Dr Mustafa Sultan
Interviews with healthcare leaders having impact at scale. Think healthcare meets the Tim Ferriss Show.
Interviews in Healthcare Entrepreneurship, AI, Academia and Policy | Get in touch: pod@musty.io
Michael Meucci (CEO) transformed Arcadia — formerly a mid-sized consultancy into a healthcare platform with $100M of Annual Recurring Revenue. How?
Lots of smart moves, including becoming really good at enterprise healthcare selling. Here's how he did it.
Links
Arcadia: https://arcadia.io/
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Dr Elina Berglund is the CEO/Co-founder of Natural Cycles, which she has grown to 2M users. When every other app seemed to be free — she made a brave decision: She charged her users a monthly fee. And it worked...
0:57 - The Birth of Natural Cycles2:57 - The Decision to Charge from the Start3:47 - Building Trust Through Pricing4:23 - From Personal Struggles to Public Solution5:52 - Creating the Fail-Safe Algorithm6:32 - Collaboration with CERN Colleagues7:13 - The Human Body: Complex Beyond Measure8:37 - The Promise and Challenge of Wearables10:16 - Understanding User Behavior11:04 - Gaining Regulatory Approval12:26 - Secrets to Growth and Marketing13:43 - The Challenge of Direct-to-Consumer Healthcare16:02 - Data-Driven Decision Making17:13 - Instincts Versus Data19:01 - Staying Honest with Data21:20 - Calibrating Communication for Investors22:30 - Benefits of Being Profitable24:08 - Data as a Superpower24:59 - Overcoming Negative PR27:13 - Future of Contraception29:30 - Impact of Roe v. Wade Overturning
Links
Natural Cycles: https://www.naturalcycles.com/
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Konstantin started Kaia Health after paying $50,000 to cure his back pain at an elite pain rehab centre. It worked. But it seemed stupid. Why did this need to cost $50,000?
Kaia Health has since raised $125M and helped 625,000 users.
0:00 The 90 second story
1:22 How did he grow 20% every week?
2:15 Market timing is everything
7:43 We never put pressure on this making any money
10:51 How does an app cure back pain?
14:43 US vs Germany for digital health entrepreneurs
16:40 Go to market of Kaia Health
19:51 Why raise so much money?
24:57 The hero license
Links
Kaia Health: https://kaiahealth.com/
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Jon Ronson is one of the most interesting people alive today — period.He’s the author of the Men Who Stare at Goats, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and The Psychopath Test — which spent 10 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.His two Ted talks have been watched 20 million times, his books have been brought to life by George Clooney on the big screen, he has written screenplays for Netflix blah blah blah.Don’t believe me, listen to a pitch Jon wrote for ‘the Psychopath Test’. If you are not dying to hear what happens next — then, I don’t what to tell you…
0:00 Jon's pitch for the Psychopath Test
1:41 Jon's story
6:00 Strategies Jon used to bypass career gatekeepers
7:03 Would Jon Ronson be on Substack/podcasting
12:05 Does Jon Ronson pay attention to analytics? Post mortems
16:26 Startup philosophy applied to storytelling
19:08 Writing Advice from Tim Ferriss: Jon's opinion on doing interesting things to write better
24:59 Does Jon Ronson like being famous?
28:49 Analysis of 'The Psychopath Test' pitch to Ira Glass
37:30 Should you make decision based on what would be a good story
38:48 Jon Ronson's habits for creative success
Max Parmentier is the CEO of Birdie, a Series B AgeTech startup who have raised $52M from the likes of Sofina, Omers Ventures and Index Ventures — and captured 10% of the UK market whilst currently scaling into Europe.
0:00 Intro
2:37 Shopify vs Amazon model in AgeTech
7:26 Product pivots: D2C never wins
11:56 Predictive AI AgeTech
13:58 I pitch an idea to Max
19:34 Lessons building Birdie
24:13 Leaving money on the table for purpose
Links
Birdie: https://www.birdie.care/
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Tom Wicher is CEO of DrDoctor — who have served over 20M patients and just raised £10M in their recent Series A round. But he spent the first 7 years bootstrapping, and diverged from his colleagues: Opting for the slow and steady gentle disruption path. Why?
0:00 Gentle disruption beats move fast and break things
3:36 Picking a problem in healthcare
5:44 Behavioural change theory
7:52 Stop treating patients like kids
10:30 Systems-level efficiency vs personalisation
13:02 Why don't patients show up for their appointments?
16:02 Overbooking: Learning from airlines
18:54 Carrot or stick: Motivating health behaviors
22:35 There's no big conspiracy in healthcare
26:24 PIFU model of patient booking
28:14 Sometime it's better not to empower patients
31:16 Habits/frameworks that have helped Tom succeed
Links
DrDoctor: https://www.drdoctor.co.uk/
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Drug discovery is becoming more expensive and producing less results than ever before (Eroom's Law)—why?One of the ballooning costs are clinical trials. Pharma/biotech often outsource their trials to CROs (contract research organisations).But many CROs are incentivised to make trials as bloated and inefficient as possible. That means more money and less results.Meri Beckwith is building the anti-CRO: Lindus Health—to solve this problem.
0:00 Intro
1:39 The big problem in drug discovery
4:10 Why do CROs exist?
7:24 The incentive problem in drug discovery/CROs
10:57 Pharma are anti-startups
12:11 How much a clinical trial costs
15:11 How can you compete with big CROs?
17:26 Are you going to build your own drug pipeline?
18:56 Lessons from VC to Founder
23:42 Brand/PR/Positioning as a biotech startup
29:03 Billion dollar ideas in bio/health
31:33 Habits that have helped Meri
Links
Lindus Health: https://www.lindushealth.com/
Meri Beckwith: https://twitter.com/meribeckwith
Mithi Thaya: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mithi-thaya/
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Rewind.ai just raised their Series A at a valuation of $350M. Investors include Andreesen Horowitz, Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.Rewind sits on your computer and phone, and watches everything you do. Then you can ask it questions like: What was that really great Mediterranean recipe I looked at last month? Or I’ve got a call with a client next week, can you summarise every interaction I’ve had with them?But here’s where it becomes even weirder, powerful.They’ve announced the Rewind Pendant, a small audio recorder that sits on your chest. Rewind will be able to listen in to every conversation you have.You can ask it: What birthday present should I get for my partner? Did they drop any hints? Or how many arguments did we have last year?Pretty Black Mirror, right?Once you get over the ick however, you realise that this is correcting a lagging human function. Just like the cursed amongst us wear glasses; tools like Rewind will repair our broken memories.I spoke to Dan Siroker, Rewind’s founder—0:00 Intro1:54 Lessons from the Obama Campaign3:28 How to use science to make your startup succeed8:21 Privacy concerns17:00 Rewind.ai as a brain-computer interface (BCI)20:27 Forgetting is important for human wellbeing22:26 Societal impacts of perfect memory28:42 Rewind's tech stack31:56 The existential risk of startups using GPT35:21 D2C is harder than B2B37:49 Leadership lessons40:31 Perils of being a second time founder46:44 Is any publicity good publicity?LinksRewind: https://www.rewind.ai/Dan Siroker: https://twitter.com/dsirokerDr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
People are wearing Apple Watches to their wedding days. Has this whole 'quantified self' movement gone bananas? Is any of this data actually useful?I spoke to Maitham Dib about this. He's building Vital (YC21); a startup which makes all wearable/lab data available to other startups/companies.0:00 Wearable data is mostly useless3:22 The case for wearable data6:37 Wearable data is mostly useless8:06 Wearable data is useful10:16 The big opportunity with wearable/lab data (startups)14:15 Naivety as a superpower (Paul Graham)15:45 Why building Vital is so hard19:31 Pros/cons of an infrastructure play in healthcare20:51 How to enterprise sales24:09 Lessons from YCombinator27:32 The benefits of being an immigrantLinksVital: https://tryvital.io/Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Dr Jared Dashevsky writes Healthcare Huddle (acquired by Workweek). He's scaled to over 30,000 subscribers. And it was pretty simple.
Here are 12 frameworks that work for healthcare content creation (and mistakes to avoid).
0:00 Intro
1:14 Consistency is king; systematise it
7:40 McKinsey reverse pyramid principle for writing
9:10 You need to have a unique/controversial take
11:41 Content for network building
15:51 Lean startup thinking does not work for content
20:35 Nobody cares about errors
25:52 Injecting personality is a competitive advantage
29:32 Boring content will make you rich
34:13 Don't make a useless audience; acquire data
41:19 Lessons from Jerry Springer
45:18 Hyperoptimisation paradox
48:49 Do things that don't scale
Links
Healthcare Huddle: https://workweek.com/brand/healthcare-huddle/Dr Jared Dashevsky: https://twitter.com/jareddashevskyDr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Despite $billions of investment into the sector — there are still no AI discovered drugs on the market. Why?Recursion Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: RXRX) is one of the hottest AI drug discovery companies on the market. Especially after NVIDIA's $50M investment into them.Dr Imran Haque (SVP of AI and Digital Sciences) explains why AI drug discovery is so tricky — and when it's arriving.0:00 Intro0:42 Decoding biology (the big idea)2:18 Why is AI drug discovery harder than it looks?4:48 Simulating the Sims (game) vs AI drug discovery6:58 Building data for AI drug discovery14:47 Recursion's successes and failures24:22 The barriers to AI drug discovery26:45 How optimistic should we be about AI drug discovery35:26 Being aggressively generalist for successPeopleDr Imran Haque: https://www.recursion.com/team-members/imran-haqueDr Imran Mahmud: https://www.imranmahmud.com/Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
0:00 NVIDIA's $50M investment into Recursion Pharmaceuticals 2:28 NVIDIA is becoming a seed investor 3:45 Bull case for Recursion Pharmaceuticals 9:20 Recursion's two big acquisitions 13:05 How are Recursion going to make money? 14:15 Recursion is overhyped 19:45 Recursion is unprofitable 22:21 Kim Kardashian's full body MRI scan 26:03 Longevity doctor's advice to Kim K 31:49 Speculating on Kim K's longevity regime (what she takes) 35:00 Outro and feedback
Podcast Links YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bigpicturemedicine Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/big-picture-medicine/id1500446262 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPmWOJkVZyUHNRSUfS?si=96c7fff6bccb456a
People Dr Imran Mahmud: https://www.imranmahmud.com/ Dr Adam Bataineh: https://twitter.com/DrAdamBat / https://numenor.health Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Ever waited months for a scan? Scan.com is making getting a scan as easy as booking an Uber. Behind the scenes of the disruptor changing medical imaging forever.
0:00 Race to the bottom? 1:34 AirBnB 11 star framework 9:57 Scan.com looks really easy to build — what's hard about it? 12:19 Lessons from working at Deliveroo 15:14 How do you make a lot of money? 19:41 Buying the domain name Scan.com 24:16 How to build a marketplace business 27:50 The perils of price transparency 30:36 What I would do to build a competitor 32:43 You need grit when building a health startup 35:46 Billion $ health ideas
Podcast Links YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEzluDRmBTVby0WsO37V-xg Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPm...
People Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/ Charlie Bullock: https://scan.com/
0:00 David Sinclair's controversial claim 1:39 Bull v bear case 6:23 David Sinclair's history of exaggerating and profiteering 8:34 Adam Neuman's involvement 11:40 Raising from unsophisticated investors 16:30 Why aren't big pharma interested in longevity? 22:45 Cynics are right, optimists get rich 25:26 Will a longevity drug be the most valuable therapeutic ever made 28:52 Feedback and outro
David Sinclair's Tweet: https://twitter.com/davidasinclair/status/1679178670743732249?s=20
David Sinclair's Research Paper: https://www.aging-us.com/article/204896/text
Elon Musk Tweet: https://twitter.com/davidasinclair/status/1679504700285104129?s=20
Dr Charles Brenner's Critique of Sinclair: https://twitter.com/CharlesMBrenner/status/1679213673771057152?s=20
Podcast Links YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bigpicturemedicine Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/big-picture-medicine/id1500446262 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPmWOJkVZyUHNRSUfS?si=96c7fff6bccb456a
People Dr Imran Mahmud: https://www.imranmahmud.com/ Dr Adam Bataineh: https://twitter.com/DrAdamBat / https://numenor.health Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
0:00 Why not let the builders build? Move fast and break things?
1:56 Why don't you ban people from googling their symptoms?
3:28 Is a disclaimer enough?
5:27 Why are LLMs difficult to regulate?
10:13 Move fast and kill patients — principal agent problem
12:23 People aren't idiots (they are)
14:20 Dr ChatGPT will never work
17:35 Spotting bubbles in healthcare
19:20 How much time does regulation add onto medical device approval?21:40 Can we ever regulate LLMs?
Podcast Links
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bigpicturemedicineApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/big-picture-medicine/id1500446262
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPmWOJkVZyUHNRSUfS?si=96c7fff6bccb456a
People
Dr Hugh Harvey: https://www.hardianhealth.com/ Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Daniel Ek (Spotify Founder) has raised $65M for his new longevity startup: Neko Health.
0:00 What is Neko Health 2:18 They're doing nothing new 5:33 The bull case; why it's going to be huge 7:47 How are they possibly going to make money!? 18:30 Why aren't they doing full body MRI? 20:26 The bear case; why this will fail 25:13 Smells a bit hypey 29:15 The risks of longevity startups and early testing 35:41 The lowdown 37:47 Unexpected way of making $$$ 40:00 Outro and feedback
Podcast Links YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bigpicturemedicine Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/big-picture-medicine/id1500446262 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPmWOJkVZyUHNRSUfS?si=96c7fff6bccb456a
People Dr Imran Mahmud: https://www.imranmahmud.com/ Dr Adam Bataineh: https://twitter.com/DrAdamBat / https://numenor.health Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
0:00 Leaked secret Apple health report
5:06 What Apple are up to in healthcare
9:21 Decentralised clinical trials
11:35 Apple healthcare leaked documents controversy
15:38 Apple is going to become a health insurer
23:07 Imran's advice to Tim Cook
26:11 Being a healthcare provider is unprofitable
28:12 Apple will make a longevity/subscription health play
30:27 Outro and feedback
Links mentioned
Apple Struggles in Push to Make Healthcare Its Greatest Legacy (Wall Street Journal): https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-struggles-in-push-to-make-healthcare-greatest-legacy-11623832200
Podcast Links
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bigpicturemedicineApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/big-picture-medicine/id1500446262
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPmWOJkVZyUHNRSUfS?si=96c7fff6bccb456a
People
Dr Imran Mahmud: https://www.imranmahmud.com/
Dr Adam Bataineh: https://twitter.com/DrAdamBat / https://numenor.health
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Huma is about to reach a 1 billion dollar valuation, and is thriving while other digital health companies are dying. But what’s their secret sauce?
Dan Vahdat is the Johns Hopkins dropout — who meticulously studied the successful business practices of big pharma, and using these, has created the 'soonicorn' digital health company that’s about to take over the world of remote patient monitoring and decentralised clinical trials.
0:00 Intro 1:11 Focusing on one big thing is bullsht 6:33 Lessons from Jony Ive 10:02 Healthtech infrastructure play 16:04 'Ownership is everything' discussion 20:18 If you maximise impact, commercial will come 24:00 Bad design hurts me 28:56 You don't need to try and inspire anyone 30:35 Are you full of sht? 32:27 How does your life change when you 'make it'? 36:50 Is studying successful people a waste of time? 39:28 Outro
Podcast Links YouTube: / @bigpicturemedicine Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPm...
People Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/ Dan Vahdat https://www.huma.com/
0:00 Intro 1:04 The genius business model of GetHarley 5:26 How important is marketing? 50% of revenue 14:57 Why aren't they doing cooler more innovative stuff? 22:38 What verticals would we expand GetHarley's biz model to 24:37 Vitamin vs painkiller 27:49 Why have investors put so much money into GetHarley? 31:00 Feedback and outro
Links mentioned GetHarley, a skincare telehealth and consultation platform, raises $52M (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/06/get... Podcast Links YouTube: / @bigpicturemedicine Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPm... People Dr Imran Mahmud: https://www.imranmahmud.com/ Dr Adam Bataineh: https://twitter.com/DrAdamBat / https://numenor.health Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
0:00 Intro
0:20 DEA comes after DTC health startups
3:18 How DTC health startups hacked customer retention
10:30 Will this kill the economics of D2C health startups?
12:57 How would we solve the problem
15:30 New LLM Paper in Nature
28:18 Audience feedback and outro
Links Mentioned
Cerebral Pushed ADHD Prescriptions And Failed To Report Data Breaches, Ex-Executive Alleges In Lawsuit (Forbes): https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiejennings/2022/04/28/cerebral-pushed-adhd-prescriptions-failed-to-report-data-breaches-ex-executive-alleges-in-lawsuit/DEA's proposed telehealth rules pull back COVID-era remote prescribing flexibilities: https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/telehealth/deas-proposed-telehealth-rules-tighten-covid-era-remote-prescribing-regulations
DEA extends telehealth prescribing flexibilities for 6 months: https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/health-tech/telehealth-providers-cheer-dea-moves-temporarily-extend-virtual-prescribing
Health system-scale language models are all-purpose prediction engines (Nature): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06160-y
Podcast Links
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bigpicturemedicine
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/big-picture-medicine/id1500446262
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPmWOJkVZyUHNRSUfS?si=96c7fff6bccb456a
People
Dr Imran Mahmud: https://www.imranmahmud.com/
Dr Adam Bataineh: https://twitter.com/DrAdamBat / https://numenor.health
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Numan have raised $70M+ and are set to become the biggest men's digital health startup, ever. Here's how. From their eccentric Founder.
0:00 Intro 0:42 Valuation 1:46 Lessons from Calm.com 4:49 Raising aggressively 7:35 Successful entrepreneurs are not hyper intelligent 10:38 When to quit 14:43 The Social R Number 18:14 Being nice gets you nowhere 22:24 Numan's marketing genius 38:09 What Adam Neumann got wrong 45:12 Narrative is like really important 49:13 Being honest about your motivations 52:59 Outro
Podcast Links YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bigpicturemedicine Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/big-picture-medicine/id1500446262 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPmWOJkVZyUHNRSUfS?si=96c7fff6bccb456a
People Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io Sokratis Papafloratos: https://www.numan.com
0:00 Intro
0:18 Ali Parsa's Immigrant Story
1:57 Picking a Problem That Was Too Big
4:15 The Supply Induced Demand Problem
5:55 The Unit Economics Problem
7:37 The Misaligned Incentives Problem
10:11 The Friction Problem
12:06 The First Mover Disadvantage
13:30 Raising Too Much Money
14:55 The SPAC Problem
17:40 The Pig With Lipstick Problem
22:07 Should Founders be Liberal with the Truth?
26:06 What Will the Next Health Unicorn Be?
Articles Mentioned
Babylon shareholders wiped out in restructuring deal: https://www.ft.com/content/ce42bcb7-d9ee-4667-910a-b6c7a419449b
Podcast Links
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bigpicturemedicineApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/big-picture-medicine/id1500446262
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPmWOJkVZyUHNRSUfS?si=96c7fff6bccb456a
People
Dr Imran Mahmud: https://www.imranmahmud.com/
Dr Adam Bataineh: https://twitter.com/DrAdamBat / https://numenor.health
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
0:00 Intro
0:38 VC Dirty Money (LP Sources)
8:30 Power Dynamics Founder vs VC
12:56 Trillion $ Alzheimer's Opportunity
14:26 Eli Lily's New Alzheimer's Blockbuster (?) Donanemab
19:01 More Issues with Donanemab Phase III Results
21:48 Will Anyone Pay for Donanemab?
24:13 Donanemab Side Effects
27:15 Startup Opportunities in Alzheimer's
31:34 Outro
Articles Mentioned
Founders need to take a stand against VC's 'dirty money’: https://sifted.eu/articles/founders-vc-dirty-money
Eli Lily Donanemab Phase III Press Release: https://investor.lilly.com/news-releases/news-release-details/lillys-donanemab-significantly-slowed-cognitive-and-functional
Cost Effectiveness of Donanemab: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35344024/
Podcast Links
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bigpicturemedicine
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/big-picture-medicine/id1500446262
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPmWOJkVZyUHNRSUfS?si=96c7fff6bccb456a
People
Dr Imran Mahmud: https://www.imranmahmud.com/
Dr Adam Bataineh: https://twitter.com/DrAdamBat?s=20
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Papers Mentioned—
ChatGPT better + more empathetic than human doctors (JAMA Int Med Paper): https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2804309
Detecting eye disease using AI (Nature Biomedical Engineering): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-022-00867-5
Predicting dementia using LLMs (PLOS Digital Health): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36812634/
AI recognises race from black and white X rays (Lancet Digital Health): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(22)00063-2/fulltext
0:00 Intro0:30 ChatGPT vs Doctors (JAMA Paper)15:57 AI Better at Diagnosis than Doctors30:57 Dirty VC Money32:02 Audience FeedbackJoined by: Dr Adam Bataineh: Longevity doctor and Co-founder Span Health (acquired by EightSleep). Dr Imran Mahmud: Investor, Oxford-trained doctor, ex-Mckinsey and Co-founder of NYE Health. Dr Mustafa Sultan: Creator of Big Picture Medicine and Doctor.
0:00 Intro
0:32 Why are VCs so unhappy?
2:18 What’s hard about being a VC?
3:56 Hustle culture, FOMO, always-on culture in VC
9:54 Is it ever easy to become rich?
12:22 It’s time to build in healthcare
15:31 Why is healthcare so hard for big tech?
17:31 Reasons why healthcare is easier than you think
21:04 Imposter syndrome for tech people entering healthcare
24:03 Would you build another healthcare startup?
25:12 Outro
Joined by:
Dr Imran Mahmud: Investor, Oxford-trained doctor, ex-Mckinsey and Co-founder of NYE Health.
Dr Mustafa Sultan: Creator of Big Picture Medicine and Doctor.
Martin Shkreli is an American Investor, Pharmaceutical Executive and Hedge Fund Manager who became the most hated man in America in 2015 when he obtained the drug Daraprim and increased its price from $13.50 a pill, to $750 overnight.
0:00 Intro
1:56 The Big Short
8:04 How to price a drug
20:01 Should we price drugs like iPhones
25:36 Pharma's dirty secret with R&D spend
34:12 Why are we not discovering more drugs? Eroom's Law
43:59 Marting's new AI Doctor — Dr Gupta
51:08 What's the FDA going to say?
53:26 Problems with GPT-4; hallucinations and sources
1:00:00 Mental health impact of being the most hated man in America
1:02:30 How rich are you?
1:08:00 Outro
Daraprim is used to treat or prevent parasitic diseases, commonly in patients with HIV or AIDS.
He defended the move by saying “If there was a company that was selling an Aston Martin at the price of a bicycle, and we buy that company and we ask to charge Toyota prices, I don't think that that should be a crime.”
Unrelated to the Daraprim scandal, in 2017 he was charged with securities fraud and sentenced to seven years in prison and fined a total of over $70M dollars.
Martin comes from humble beginnings, his parents are Albanian immigrants — but he quickly ascended the world and became a multimillionaire polymath. And despite having no formal training in Medical Sciences — he has a penchant for consuming medical literature from PubMed, and making novel insights.
We talk about how Martin does this, his philosophy around drug pricing — and whether we should think about pricing drugs in the same way we price iPhones, we talk about whether blowing more money into pharma research & development actually leads to more exciting drugs, Martin’s new AI doctor that he just launched and the mental health impact of being the world’s most hated man.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Dr Ben Maruthappu is the the Co-founder and CEO of Cera Care; a digitally-enabled social care company which has raised over $400M dollars. He was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2020.
0:00 Intro
0:47 Ben's story
6:10 How to have good ideas, at the right time
12:14 Good decisions Ben made with Cera to scale
21:07 Is the US greener pastures?
28:10 What healthtech can learn from fintech, ridesharing and food delivery
30:17 Anti-lessons from other industries
33:53 How do you stop driving becoming toxic
36:13 Are founders olympic athletes who don't deserve work-life balance?
38:31 Are you full of sh*t? What are your real motives?
41:19 Are successful founders happy people?
43:30 Mo money mo problems
46:51 The power of vulnerability vs the magnetism of certainty
52:21 Networking advice
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Dr Ala Alenazi is a TechBio Investor at Ascension and holds a PhD in Molecular Genetics from Cambridge University — she describes herself as a recovering scientist with extreme FOMO.
0:00 Intro
0:47 Being bombastic
3:32 Do PhDs make good VC investors?
10:38 How much of VC is luck?
12:47 Network building in VC
19:16 Getting deal flow
22:15 How to ask for things
24:43 Experience being a brown woman in VC
28:42 No one gives you anything, you just have to take it
33:50 Main character syndrome
We talk about how being bombastic is the key to getting opportunities, why contrary to popular belief — PhDs don’t suck as investors, how to ask people to do things for you and what it’s like being a brown woman in VC.
You can find me on Twitter@MustafaSultanand subscribe to my newsletter onwww.musty.io
0:00 Intro
0:54 Is AI Too Powerful?
17:59 Outlive, Peter Attia's New Longevity Bible
45:16 Why Are Americans Dying So Young?
Joined by:
Dr Adam Baitaineh: Longevity doctor and Co-founder Span Health (acquired by EightSleep).
Dr Imran Mahmud: Investor, Oxford-trained doctor, ex-Mckinsey and Co-founder of NYE Health.
Dr Mustafa Sultan: Creator of Big Picture Medicine and Doctor.
Dr John Whyte is the Chief Medical Officer of WebMD, he’s also worked at Director level at the FDA and was also Chief Medical Expert at the Discovery Channel.
0:00 Intro
0:54 Anxiety as a content creator
2:33 Why should executives think like physicians?
7:23 Decision-making with limited information
10:47 Bayesian reasoning
12:57 Risk, acuity and stress
15:28 What should we NOT learn from physicians?
17:06 Future of health communication, health influencers
22:29 Regulation for health influencers?
24:22 Habit: I've never applied for a job
26:53 Networking building
28:24 Introspection as a habit for success
John runs a course called 'Think Like a Doctor to Make Executive Decisions' — and I ask about different frameworks executives can pick up from doctors and use in non-healthcare settings (such as bayesian reasoning and assessing what is a symptom vs a cause).
John’s also a veteran of the health communication space, and we discuss where the future of health content is going, and the art of storytelling.
John's course: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/think-like-a-doctor-to-make-executive-decisions
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Morgan Cheatham is Vice President at Bessemer Venture Partners and an MD Student at Brown. He was Forbes30u30 for Venture Capital. He discusses some of his billion $ health ideas (from episode #110).
Full interview: https://youtu.be/fvi0hjKtsVU
0:00 Intro
1:00 AI drug development
7:04 Big picture impact of AI drug development
9:14 Counterintuitive facts about drug development
11:06 Why can't we just make novel drugs with AI? Biology is hard
19:06 Microsoft's GPT-4 healthcare play
26:48 The hardest thing about health startups
31:49 Outro
Joined by:
Dr Adam Baitaineh: Longevity doctor and Co-founder Span Health (acquired by EightSleep).
Dr Imran Mahmud: Investor, Oxford-trained doctor, ex-Mckinsey and Co-founder of NYE Health.
Dr Mustafa Sultan: Creator of Big Picture Medicine and Doctor.
Dr Shivdev Rao is a Cardiologist and CEO/Co-founder of Abridge, who have raised over $22M.
Think of Abridge like an Alexa or Siri (or other voice assistant) that sits there whilst the physician and patient talk.
Instead of the physician writing notes during the consult, or staying late and charting — Abridge listens to the conversation and writes up the notes for them.
Similarly, instead of the patient frantically taking notes, or being bombarded with information — most of which they will forget — Abridge can send them an appropriately-pitched record of what was said, with key takeaways.
We talk about how Shiv built and grew this company, I ask him about the existential threat of LLMs like ChatGPT, how being in the intensive care unit is similar to building a startup, and how operating from a place of abundance is a key to success.
0:00 Intro
1:35 Shiv's story
8:50 Cross pollination as a tech CEO
12:02 Abridge, idea to execution
17:19 Possibilities with big data
19:53 Threat of LLMs like ChatGPT
23:52 How will Abridge fail?
25:22 How to stay focused
27:10 Leadership lessons
31:14 Habits that have helped Shiv
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
0:00 Intro
1:27 Semaglutide (Wegovy) lowdown, use in longevity clinics
6:38 Is a 'pill for everything' a bad thing?
10:39 What's going to happen to all the DTC weight loss startups?
13:37 Is Semaglutide a TikTok conspiracy by big pharma?
14:55 The new alcohol-free alcohol, GABA
21:07 Where are all the big UK healthtech exits?
24:16 US investors/entrepreneurs are more ambitious
27:41 Is DTC digital health the way to go?
32:40 Is there much point building in the UK?
Joined by:
Dr Adam Baitaineh: Longevity doctor and Co-founder Span Health (acquired by EightSleep).
Dr Imran Mahmud: Investor, Oxford-trained doctor, ex-Mckinsey and Co-founder of NYE Health.
Dr Mustafa Sultan: Creator of Big Picture Medicine and Doctor.
0:00 Intro
1:09 David Sinclair's New Startup
11:25 ChatGPT for Drug Development
28:32 Transhumanist Gene Editing to Sleep Less
37:38 Banter/Audience Feedback
Dr Adam Bataineh: Longevity doctor and Co-founder Span Health (acquired by EightSleep).
Dr Imran Mahmud: Investor, Oxford-trained doctor, ex-Mckinsey and Co-founder of NYE Health.
Dr Mustafa Sultan: Creator of Big Picture Medicine and Doctor.
Dr Ignacio Medrano is the Founder of Savana (raised $44M dollars with over 100 employees). They use AI to unlock all the value out of clinical records and produce real world evidence.
0:00 Intro
0:34 Ignacio's story
1:30 Learnings from Neurology -> Entrepreneurship
3:27 How to build good health products/services
5:03 Downsides of being a doctor in health entrepreneurship
7:21 Just in case vs just in time learning
9:14 Perils of perfectionism in healthcare
12:34 Do you need to be a d**k to be a good leader?
14:27 Dunbar's number — leading bigger organisations
17:52 Differences in operating in Europe
20:12 Diagnostic medical AI is a waste of time
23:15 SWOT analysis of Savana
26:07 Threats to Savana — LLMs?
29:22 Being eccentric as a competitive advantage
31:09 Becoming a better speaker/storyteller
34:02 Declining Royal Academy of Sciences invite
36:24 Arrogance as a competitive advantage
38:48 Tribes — exclusion criteria importance
40:27 Billion $ Health Idea
41:38 Not watching TV as a competitive advantage
46:40 Outro
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Dr Stephanie Eltz is a Trauma Surgeon and CEO and Co-founder of Doctify, which is basically Yelp/Trustpilot for Doctors. They’ve raised >£22M dollar in funding to date.
0:00 Intro
0:41 Story
2:34 Motivations
3:47 Building Doctify
8:25 Why do you have grit? Early childhood
9:21 Are patient reviews good measures of a doctor?
13:53 There is no growth hack
16:34 How to stop reviews becoming a cesspit
19:48 Monetising
21:15 It's all about the destination
22:46 Happiness as a founder
24:31 Are you full of sh*t?
26:48 First become a King, then a Philosopher
28:10 Leadership and MBTI 29:28 Habits
30:20 Insecurity and immigrant hustle
33:16 Hustling
35:00 You don't need to network
36:17 Outro
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Jason Foster is the CEO of Ori Biotech; a cell and gene therapy company who have raised $139M in funding. He also sits on the boards of companies like GripAble, Credentially, and Auxita — and is an active angel investor.
0:00 Intro
0:34 Jason's story
5:31 What was your goal?
6:39 When did you make it?
8:31 Taking calculated risks in life
10:48 Creating value vs chasing $$
12:15 When should you say no?
16:39 How to coach people
20:53 How to find a coach?
23:37 How to do cold outreach
27:16 Being a marketer and making it in biotech
31:54 Introversion vs extroversion as a CEO/founder
35:37 How to build professional relationships, Neurolinguistic Programming
37:54 The founders first zeitgeist
42:05 Managing your ego
45:07 Disagreeable givers
45:39 Why do media?
46:29 Jason's grand theory
51:59 Why are health/life sciences/biotech unique markets?
55:28 Billion dollar health idea 1
59:57 Billion dollar health idea 2
1:04:00 Money and happiness
1:07:50 Habits that have helped Jason
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Dr Adam Bataineh is a Longevity Doctor and Founder of Span Health (acquired by EightSleep).
0:00 Intro
0:15 Bryan Johnson's Blueprint Program
12:32 Spotify's Daniel Ek Enters Healthcare
22:27 VitaDAO Raises $4.1 (from Pfizer, Balaji Srinivasan...)
Morgan Cheatham is Vice President at Bessemer Ventures and an MD Student at Brown. He was Forbes30u30 for Venture Capital.
Morgan is a super smart guy who has lots of interesting theses and billion dollar ideas in health and life sciences, including ones in generative AI and biosecurity.
We also spend lot of time talking about relationship-building, networking and using the content game to make it in health.
0:00 Intro
0:31 Relationship building
1:54 What you can offer people
3:33 Having strong beliefs as a competitive advantage
4:02 How to develop unique theses in health
6:56 How to avoid just following trends and have original ideas
10:09 How to network
13:15 How to use content as a USP in health
19:58 Is content-creation for charlatans?
21:54 Predictions in health: Generative AI + BioSecurity
27:19 BioSecurity Idea
29:27 Billion $ Health Ideas
31:43 Generative AI in healthcare
34:11 Book recommendations
37:06 Habits
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Dr Adam Bataineh is a Longevity Doctor and Founder of Span Health (acquired by EightSleep). We discuss:
0:00 David Sinclair's New Ageing Paper — Legit?
15:52 Amazon RxPass — All Hype?
23:37 Metformin is San Francisco's New Birth Control
30:58 Decline in Disruptive Science — Why?
Links
David Sinclair's Paper: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)01570-7
Nature Decline in Disruptive Science Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x
New series. We brainstorm billion $ health ideas.
Dr Chris Lovejoy is a Cambridge-trained Medical Doctor, Startup Founder and Data Scientist specialising in medical AI and health informatics. He has an IQ of between 4000–5000. Find out what he's working on at www.chrislovejoy.me.
0:00 Intro
0:10 Generative AI
28:55 DTC Weight Loss Clinics
45:27 Cross Border Care
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Dr Anas Nader is the CEO and Co-founder of Patchwork Health; an end-to-end workforce solution which helps health systems tackle the staffing crisis. They have raised over $30M.
0:00 Intro
0:29 Why Anas has more employees than WhatsApp
9:24 How to get your product into healthcare providers
12:38 Business opportunities in health-tech
15:22 Habits that have helped Anas
17:11 Similarities between surgical decision-making and startups
18:21 Resource recommendations
22:10 Why you need an executive coach
We talk about why the patchwork team is bigger than WhatsApp’s, how to get your product into healthcare systems and key decision making frameworks Anas has learned.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Tess Cosad is the Co-founder and CEO of Béa Fertility; who have raised £2.2M in an effort to democratise access to safe and affordable fertility treatment.
0:00 Intro
1:15 Lessons from PR to healthtech
2:25 Storytelling
5:29 What do others get wrong?
6:54 Does PR add value to the world?
8:01 Béa Fertility origin story
10:16 Advice on relationship-building
11:13 Getting better at pitching
12:15 Future of Béa Fertility
16:28 Benefits of at home clinical care
19:08 Do we need more babies?
20:44 China/Japan
21:57 Moore's Law in Fertility
25:17 Opportunities in fertility tech
27:23 Habits that have helped Tess
30:23 Book recommendations
31:27 Being bold
Specifically, Béa deliver kit to carry out one cycle of intracervical insemination straight to the user’s door. She was previously in the Public Relations world, as Managing Director of Emberson Ventures and we talk about lessons healthtech startups can learn from the PR world.
We also talk about how she’s built Bea, crucial leadership advice she’s received from her mentors and big opportunities in the fertility market.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io1
Guillermo Vela is the CEO and Co-Founder of NeuScience, a VC-backed TechBio company using AI to discover novel cancer biomarkers.
0:00 Intro
0:55 Eroom's Law
5:37 Contrarian View of Cancer
15:54 AI Will Not Make Drug Discovery Fast, Better or Cheaper
26:14 Failing is Not a Good Thing
26:38 TechBio Funding
34:07 Habits
He went viral, in the techbio scene, with his 'Five TechBio Myths That Must Go' article in which he explained why it doesn’t take $2.5bn to develop a drug and why technologies like AI wont’ make drug discovery faster, better or cheaper. We discuss that article, we discuss Guillermo’s contrarian view of cancer, why we’re doing more science than ever but not seeing results and how his ADD brain is a superpower.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io1
Dr Ivan Beckley is the Co-Founder of Suvera Health, a Google-backed virtual clinic which has raised over £6M in funding.
0:00 Intro
0:42 Ivan's Story
5:14 Making Cash?
7:07 Building Suvera
10:19 Clinician-Product Fit
11:58 Growing
14:11 Experience of Feedback
16:56 Lessons from Google
19:47 Being Black in Tech
23:20 Further Growth
25:36 How Can Someone Move Faster Than You?
28:45 Habits That Have Helped You?
Ivan started Suvera whilst in Medical School at UCL — and has since expanded it from a basic app which could help GPs (Primary Care Physicians) complete medication reviews for their patients, to a full fledged virtual care platform for people with chronic illnesses.
We dig deep into the lessons and habits that have helped Ivan grow Suvera — like how the obstacle is often the way — and how he leans into discomfort as a signal of future success. We speak about how he changed the minds of people who were sceptical of him, how someone building in healthcare today could move faster than him and what it’s like being a black man in healthtech.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Dr Daniel Kraft is a Stanford and Harvard-trained physician-scientist and inventor. He serves as faculty chair for Medicine at Singularity University, is founder and chair of Exponential Medicine and has given four TED and two TEDMED talks.
He’s also the inventor of the MarrowMiner, an FDA-approved device for the minimally invasive harvest of bone marrow, and founder of RegenMed Systems, a company developing technologies to enable stem cell-based regenerative therapies.
He’s also served as an officer and flight surgeon with F-15 & F-16 fighter Squadrons. He has conducted research on aerospace medicine that was published with NASA, with whom he was a finalist for astronaut selection.
We discuss why — despite reaching the fourth industrial revolution — healthcare seems to be stuck in the third or second. Dark horses in healthcare and some of the magic that has helped Daniel get to where he is today.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
How do you spend £16 billion to improve the world’s health?
That is the job of Sir Jeremy Farrar, the Director of the Wellcome Trust. In 1936, British pharmaceutical magnate Sir Henry Wellcome left his fortune to improve the world’s health. Now Sir Jeremy must work out what to do with £16 billion over the next decade — and where to most effectively spend it.
0:00 Intro
0:47 The Third Role of Philanthropy
2:53 Appetite for Risk
5:38 What's Broken in Science Funding
8:16 Generalism vs Specialism
10:12 Why Are You Slow?
14:49 Sexy vs Incremental
17:04 How Much of Your Job Is Not Messing Things Up?
19:35 Metrics for Philanthropy
22:10 Playing the Long Game
23:20 How Do You Know You're Doing a Good Job?
28:05 First Become a King, Then a Philosopher (?)
30:00 Habits That Have Helped In Your Career
31:52 What's It Like Being Famous?
33:28 Book Recommendations
By background he is a medical doctor and researcher, he has been named 12th in Fortune’s list of the world’s 50 greatest leaders, served in the UK’s SAGE group and was knighted in 2019 for his services to Global Health.
I ask him about how he spends that money, how to measure philanthropic impact, problems and opportunities within research funding and just how much of his job is just not messing things up.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Dr Imran Mahmud studied Medicine at Oxford, before studying Public Health at Harvard on a Fulbright Scholarship. He then ranked first in the country entering the Ophthalmology training programme — promptly leaving and joining McKinsey. In 2018 he co-founded NYE Health, raising over £4M. He is now a startup advisor, angel investor, digital health consultant and content creator.
We speak about angel investing — which was traditionally a way in which high net worth individuals could invest in small startups — but is now becoming possible for many more people. We speak about the digital nomad post-economic lifestyle — and whether doing whatever you want, wherever you want actually makes you happy. And one of my favourite one of Imran’s principles: To be interesting, do interesting things.
I hope you enjoy.
0:00 Intro
0:49 How to angel invest
06:47 Can anyone angel invest?
10:46 To be interesting, do interesting things
12:43 Does money buy happiness?
16:40 Does freedom make you happy?
19:47 Is homeschooling weird?
23:52 Why are successful people making content?
29:20 Content creation as a competitive advantage
32:07 Better to know how to code or know how to make content?
33:19 Managing your ego
35:43 Habits that have helped you in your career?
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
After missing out on getting into Medical School, Ahmed studied Computer Science — later completing his PhD at Cambridge University. As a student, he launched his own health AI startup — which diagnosed rashes on intimate body parts.
This didn’t work out and he pivoted and launched a data AI company called Catalyst AI. This company was later acquired by Farfetch; the luxury online fashion retail platform to help optimise their fashion supply chains.
He now sits on the Prime Minister of Pakistan’s Science and Technology task force, on the Development Council of the Woolf Institute and is the Co-founder of a sustainable fashion enterprise.
We speak the about the unlikely overlaps between fashion and healthtech — no seriously there are lots of them, we speak about how to find your ultimate purpose and how when building relationships — the ultimate form of self-serving is being a giver.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Dr Sandeep Bansal is the Founder and CEO of Medic Bleep; a pager replacement which raised over £3M. On top of that, he recently co-founded Carebyte Health — which offers personalised on-demand healthcare to Indians. He is also Faculty at Harvard Medical School and Barts.
This is a super interesting conversation in which Sandeep explains how he has partnered with some of India’s largest companies, to pay Indians to be healthy, how crypto fits into that mission and the fascinating new HealthTech/FinTech fusion model hitting emerging markets.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Dr Molly Gilmartin is an Investment Manager at AlbionVC who manage over $1bn in assets and have invested in companies like Arecor, Healios and Pando.
She studied Medicine at Oxford, was a founding team member of Pando, Chief Commerical Officer of Induction Healthcare, a Consultant at McKinsey and now an Investor at AlbionVC.
We talk a lot about the psychology of communication, about strength-based feedback and radical candour, about how being inquisitive can get you very far, how energy is Molly’s superpower and lots of other frameworks that Molly finds useful in her career. We finish off by discussing her thesis on the emerging B2C2B model in healthcare.
This is a really value packed interview — I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Joe Stringer is a Partner at Octopus Ventures, one of the largest European Venture Capital firms with £1.8 billion under management.
He was Partner at Ernst & Young for 10 years, before leaving his cushy position to launch his own venture fund TenX Health. He then led Google Health in the UK before becoming Partner at Octopus Ventures.
We talk about his thesis on the future of health, the importance of hard work, grit and resilience, as well as building and managing relationships — in particular, trying not to be too British.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Dr Patrick Malone is an MD, as well as having a PhD in Neuroscience. His research focused on computational cognitive neuroscience and AI applications in radiology.
In 2020, he joined the investment team at Northpond Ventures where he invests in early-stage health-tech and deep-tech companies.
Patrick put together a viral Twitter thread on his transition from Medicine and Research into Venture Capital. In 40 tweets, he detailed his high yield advice on networking, communication and which skills are useful to develop. Essentially a Bible on some of the meta skills needed to have impact at scale in healthcare.
In this episode we discuss that thread — and I ask Patrick to expand on some of those meta skills, and we also talk about his thesis on the future of healthcare.
I think this is a super valuable interview — I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Niklas Rindtorff is a Physician-Scientist and one of the Pioneers in decentralised healthcare and life sciences.
He has an MD from Heidelberg University and he received his Master's Degree in Biomedical Informatics from Harvard Medical School as a Fulbright Scholar.
He is a founder of LabDAO, an online community of life scientists collaborating to increase the accessibility of life science tools both in the dry lab and wet lab. He’s also a Core Member of VitaDAO, a collective funding early stage longevity research.
DAOs are Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and a staple of the ongoing WEB3 revolution.
Investopedia defines DAOs as having no central governing body, every member within a DAO typically shares a common goal and attempts to act in the best interest of the entity. Popularized through cryptocurrency enthusiasts and blockchain technology, DAOs are used to make decisions in a bottom-up management approach.
Or as Niklas describes them, DAOs are basically a WhatsApp group chat with an attached cryptocurrency bank account.
In this conversation, I find out about how DAOs can be used in healthcare. From enabling rare disease research to fixing science’s publishing problems. I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Nikhil Patel is the Founder and CEO of Craniometrix, where they’re using innovative deep learning and digital health tools to diagnose Alzheimer’s Disease — and position themselves as the all-in-one Alzheimer’s care platform.
Nikhil studied Computer Science and Economics at Yale University, before launching Craniometrix — which was accepted into Y Combinator and have raised $6M in their seed round.
We talk about how he’s been able to build Craniometrix as a 22-year-old and get investors really excited about his vision, how a digital tool can unlock new levels of diagnostic ability and why Nikhil talks so fast.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Neil Daly is the Founder and CEO of Skin Analytics; a company which uses AI to detect skin cancer.
Neil started Skin Analytics in 2012 after working extensively in mobile innovation and strategy consulting. They’ve raised a total of $9M.
If detected early, melanoma can have a 99% survival rate — which dramatically decreases the later it’s picked up — creating a very important opportunity for companies like Skin Analytics.
But there are some important caveats to clear up. For example, I ask Neil: Whose fault is it when the algorithm misses a cancer? The doctor’s or the algorithm's?
I also ask if algorithms are unfairly held to a higher standard than human doctors, and we speak about the making of the Skin Analytics algorithm — and how it broke away from conventional wisdom.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Gian Seehra co-founded Pebble Labs and Trait Biosciences — having raised a total of $16M.
He was also a VC at Octopus Ventures, where he oversaw over $200M in funding. He led QuitGenius’s $12M Series A and also facilitated follow-on investments into companies such as Elvie, Big Health and Depop.
He now takes his knowledge built from being on the other side of the table — to coach entrepreneurs on how best to pitch and tell their story in order to raise money.
We discuss how to pitch to investors — good ways of doing so, but also common mistakes. We also discuss the core tenants of authenticity, logic, empathy and the X factor.
Essentially ways of sidestepping the monotony of “here are the 10 things investors want to see” — and instead really getting investors excited about what your vision and what you’re building — and hopefully throwing money at you.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Healthcare leadership advice from Sir Bruce Keogh, Dr Eric Topol, Dr Susan Thomas, Dr Fiona Godlee, Dr Ben Maruthappu, Dr Claire Novorol, Will Gibbs, Prof Pearse Keane, Prof Neil Sebire, Melissa Morris and Will Gibbs.
All the greatest hits.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Tina Woods is Director of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Longevity secretariat and CEO of Collider Health; who work with private, public and third sectors to accelerate innovation and transform health with sustainable impact at scale
She also leads the Open Life Data Framework and is the author of ‘Live Longer with AI: How artificial intelligence is helping us extend our healthspans and live better too'. She is also one of the authors of the influential ‘Levelling Up Health’ Report — which was supported by the Health Secretary and CMO.
Essentially, Tina is someone who has a truly big picture view of everything needed to add five years of healthy life expectancy while minimising health inequalities.
It’s easy for doctors and medical researchers to believe that their contributions are what will really move the needle in improving the world’s health — but really, we’re a small part of that picture.
We talk about what we can learn from fintech, whether government is useless and it’s the Elon Musks of the world who will drive change and how to spearhead a movement and really make things happen.
Tina is really fascinating — I hope you enjoy.
Dr Adam Bataineh is a Longevity Doctor in the UK and Co-Founder of Span Health, a data-driven health coaching company which was built to increase human performance. Span helped members optimise sleep, nutrition, and exercise with science-based experiments. It was acquired by Eight Sleep in 2022 for an undisclosed amount.
Adam is really interesting because he’s a pioneer in Medicine. Longevity doesn’t really exist as a specialty in the UK but he’s creating his own niche. Improving the longevity and healthspan of people requires a broad and complete knowledge of human physiology, but it also requires a rich understanding of behavioural psychology and how to incentivise people to act today in a way that future them will be thankful.
Or put another way, instead of putting out fires — doctors like Adam are trying to stop or at least delay the fires from happening in the first place. We talk about Adam’s story and how he approached building Span, his approach to optimising longevity as well as some of his personal testing stack. I hope you enjoy.
Dr Joshua Landy is a Canadian Intensive Care Doctor and Co-founder of Figure 1.
Figure 1 is sometimes described as Instagram for doctors — but it essentially allows healthcare professionals to share and discuss cases across the world.
It’s been used by over 40% of medical students in North America and it boasts over 3 million users. They’ve raised a total of $23.5 million dollars.
In this interview, we discuss the story of how Josh and his team built Figure 1, with a particular focus on how they grew and made money from it — as well as some of the big picture business decisions and directions they chose to go in.
Josh is extremely open and candid about the whole process — and I think you’ll particularly enjoy this interview if you’re thinking of building and growing your own healthcare startup.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Dr Nir Barzilai is Professor and Founding Director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Human Aging Research and of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Nathan Shock Centers of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging.
Essentially he is an OG (original gangster) in human longevity research. When describing him, David Sinclair writes “Not only is he a world leader in aging research, but also happens to be one of the best science communicators on the planet”. Barzilai is also the author of Age Later: Secrets of the Healthiest, Sharpest Centenarians.
He has over 270 peer reviewed papers and also co-founded CohBar, a publicly listed biotech company developing mitochondrial therapies for ageing.
In his quest to fight ageing — he has consulted or presented to institutions such as the Vatican, PepsiCo and Singapore’s Prime Minister’s Office.
He also leads the TAME Trial which is looking at a cheap and commonly used diabetes drug called Metformin — to see if it can slow down the process of ageing.
Metformin first gained interest in the longevity space, when people began to notice that diabetics on metformin seemed to have lower mortalities than diabetes on other drugs. In fact, diabetics on metformin had lower death rates than similar people — who didn’t have diabetes and so were not on metformin.
Just to be clear, diabetics on metformin with a serious medical condition — which is one of the big four killers in the developed world — appear to have lower death rates than non-diabetics who aren’t taking metformin. That’s crazy.
In his TAME trial he’s investigating if metformin can delay the progression of age related diseases in older adults.
Barzilai is part of a movement in longevity research or geroscience, who aim to treat ageing as a disease in itself — instead of treating one disease, only for another to take its place.
In a 1990 paper in Science, it was estimated that if we cured all cancers — we would extend the average lifespan by just three years. That’s not to say that developing therapies for cancers is wrong, but to really move the needle on health and lifespan extension — we need to think of tackling ageing and not just individual manifestations of ageing such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease and Alzheimers.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 charge of their own health and data.
Hamish came from the world of FinTech having headed International Payments and Remittance at Travelex, before co-founding Thriva in 2016. Thriva has raised $14.7 million dollars to date.
We talk about democratising access to healthcare testing and whether there should be limits on what tests we offer people, whether just giving people more data is the panacea in improving life and health span and how sometimes — outsiders are best placed to tackle some of the big problems in healthcare.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 Clinical Researcher across both Oxford and some of the US’s greatest research houses. For example, just in the infancy of his career, he discovered PKD1 — a gene linked to Polycystic Kidney Disease. The seminal paper was published in Nature in 1985.
Finally — in the third act, he moved into the world of business and investment — in which he tackled how to translate some of these discoveries into great businesses that could benefit people at scale. He was also the first investor and acting CEO of UpToDate.
In this interview, I try and unpack what made him able to excel in all three acts — and also, why a flourishing Doctor and Clinical Academic would move into the world of investment.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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. As well as his role at YouTube, Vishaal is also a Governor at the Royal Free London NHS Trust.
This episode is a bit different to usual. This is a call in which I’m getting some mentorship advice on how to build my network in digital health, and how I should be leveraging this podcast to make useful and lasting connections.
Although the advice is specific to my case, I think it’s quite useful for anyone who’s starting their career in healthcare and wants to do interesting things in research, entrepreneurship or policy. I think Vishaal’s advice is quite broadly applicable to anyone in similar shoes.
Towards the end we discuss YouTube’s mission in healthcare, and some of the challenges that come along with it.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 in a pre-seed round led by JME Ventures.
Mehdi is also the author of the newsletter the Long Game which is probably in my top 2 or 3 newsletters I consume. He writes incredibly thoughtful and detailed articles on health optimisation, longevity, fasting, fitness, nutrition, the future of aging & self-experimentation.
In this conversation, we essentially break down play by play how to use data and metrics to improve health behaviours — and how it’s not as easy as just give them the data and they will improve their health behaviours. Really there’s so much more to positively influencing our behaviour and psychology — and it’s really fascinating to discuss with someone whose ideas and thoughts I have so much admiration for.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 School of Foreign Service. She was then a Presidential Management Fellow at the U.S. Department of State. She directed social impact investments at Google.Org. She was partner at GV (previously Google Ventures).
She's been named a "top 30 under 40 in healthcare" by Business Insider and “top 9 women to watch in venture capital" by The Wall Street Journal. She is a member of Fortune's Most Powerful Women and a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
We talk about her story, how her network is one of her most important assets and how much VC fits into philanthropy and doing good.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 Card is a credit card which can take an ECG — all whilst fitting into your wallet.
He also has over 75 patents and 100 scientific publications.
We speak about his formula and framework for innovating, lessons he’s learnt from his buddies such as Eric Topol and Vinod Khosla and whether everything in Medicine should be democratised.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 better as you climb up the career ladder.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 applied to patients and why it’s so important for doctors to be in the driving seat as leaders — not just passive observers.
I hope you enjoy.
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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 when she did, whether the NHS is where startups go to die and the power of timing and just taking a calculated risk when it makes sense for you.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 founder in a taboo industry and how optimism is a habit rather than something you’re born with.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 has been adopted by NHS Trusts such as Imperial College and Chelsea and Westminster.
We talk about what it’s like to be CEO as an introvert, the challenges and opportunities in digitising consent and distributed leadership.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 its applications to healthcare and Keith’s experiences with burnout.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 sedentary lifestyle. They are hunter gatherers and are about 7 times more active than the average American.
You would expect then, that they must be burning thousands of more calories than the typical desk jockey — but they don’t. In fact, on average, they burn the same number of calories as the average American — even when we adjust for height and weight.
So what’s going on?
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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 leaving Medicine and if the grass is really greener on the other side, how to network, effective decision making and lots more. I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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, Jude and Cerina.
We talk about his story, what he learnt about crisis management and the future role of private healthcare in the UK.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 learned from moving from research to industry, how AI can actually make Medicine more personal and I ask her why she believes in promoting diversity in STEM and why it isn’t just a case of ‘best person for the job’.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 to 50% and every minute counts. In fact, for every hour treatment is delayed — mortality increases by 7.6%.
We started off by talking about a paper published in JAMA earlier this year. It assessed a popular sepsis prediction tool and found that it wasn’t very good. It was delivering so many false positives, that doctors would need to assess up to 109 patients flagged by the tool just to find one patient who was actually septic…
Michael's Preprint: Predicting Sepsis in Multi-site, Multi-national Intensive Care Cohorts Using Deep Learning
Michael Moor*, Nicolas Bennet∗, Drago Plecko∗, Max Horn∗,Bastian Rieck, Nicolai Meinshausen, Peter Bühlmann and Karsten Borgwardt.
JAMA 2021 Paper: External Validation of a Widely Implemented Proprietary Sepsis Prediction Model in Hospitalized Patients
Andrew Wong, Erkin Otles, Meng; John P. Donnelly, Andrew Krumm, Jeffrey Mccullough, Olivia Detroyer-cooley, Justin Pestrue, Mecon Marie Phillips, Judy Konye, Carleen Penoza, Muhammad Ghous, Karandeep Singh
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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 advice he gives to young physician-leaders, why working in primary care was critical for his career and some of the lessons he’s learnt along the way.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 as Deliveroo and Rota.com.
We talk about his fascinating winding story — particularly how he was willing to drop it all in pursuit of his passion, we talk about how he was able to build and scale his companies whilst at Medical School and how being a little bit obsessive has paid dividends throughout his career.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 MBA at the Harvard Business School.
We talk about some of his research which focuses on building Electronic Health Records in low and middle income countries such as Syria — which has garnered support from the WHO. We also talk about what it was about him and what approaches he used to achieve such amazing success when living and working during the Syrian Civil War.
I hope you enjoy.
Alex's Podcast: https://potbppodcast.com
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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, and how we can better build AI systems which avoid perpetuating and falling into these traps.
We talk about his fascinating story, how he created an AI algorithm which actually reduced bias and superseded human performance and some of the things he’s learnt along the way.
I hope you enjoy.
Prof Obermeyer's new initiative: Nightingale Open Source.
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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 privilege to get his thoughts.
This is the third podcast interview I’ve done with him. In Episode 2 of this podcast we talked about his story and informatics, then in Episode 17 we talked about how to be more effective at what you do as a Clinical Academic. This is a continuation of that last episode — in which I ask more about how to become a great Clinical Academic, how to make better decisions, how to play the long game, what’s worth pursuing and what’s best to ignore and lots more.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 decision making and useful mental models as a healthtech founder, and some of Yusuf’s failures and how he dealt with them.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 of the clinic.
I hope you enjoy.
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 constrained health service. Far easier, the criticism goes, to just give someone a pill.
Fundamentally, the problem is that prescription drugs are very scalable and relatively cheap. Face-to-face CBT on the other hand, is expensive and doesn’t scale well.
But new approaches package CBT into a digital platform or app — making it infinitely more scalable — and opening it up to many more patients.
Big Health are creators of a digital CBT program called Sleepio. Sleepio boasts the largest evidence base in digital mental health with 13 randomised controlled trials. Its parent company: Big Health has raised over $50M in funding.
We talk about digital therapy for sleep, as well as some debate about whether digital therapeutics require the same evidence as traditional medications.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 Code and more) discourse.digitalhealth.net
Open Health Hub - completely open discussion of all things open sourcey in healthcare https://openhealthhub.org/
My OSITOWFM blog https://medium.com/@marcus_baw/open-source-is-the-only-way-for-medicine-9e698de0447e
"Royal Colleges 3.0" https://marcus-baw.medium.com/royal-colleges-3-0-best-practice-as-code-7065bce821a7
Faculty of Clinical Informatics https://facultyofclinicalinformatics.org.uk/
RCGP Health Informatics Group (for GPs who are RCGP members only) - GP IT specialism https://hig.primary-care.org.uk
Chamberlen Forceps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrical_forceps#History
Me on Twitter https://twitter.com/marcus_baw
Marcus's Website: https://pacharanero.github.io
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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 similar.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 the BMJ is not just a medical journal but a societal intervention, existential threats to the BMJ, the future vision and what Dr Godlee’s learned about leadership on her journey.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 the details behind starting Ada and its initial reception from doctors, some of its successes and future direction and finally we talk about Daniel’s leadership philosophy and some of the things he’s learnt as Ada’s grown.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 ask her about some dubious rumours I've heard about McKinsey.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 Graduate School of Business, and that’s when him and his co-founder Tashfeen Ekram (a medical doctor) started working on Luma.
This episode is littered with gems of advice from Adnan, and we spend a lot of time talking about the early days of Luma — and how he got those initial customers onboard. We also discuss some of his thinking and decision making as CEO, and what it’s like to be a Pakistani dude in Silicon Valley.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 right when others are wrong and how to become a superconnector.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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, leaving Medicine and what it’s like as a woman in healthtech.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 need to be given a placebo — a fake or dummy version of the treatment with no therapeutic effect.
But using generative machine learning models, you can create a digital twin — a digital copy of a patient which might be able to emulate what would have happened to that patient if they’d received a placebo.
The promise of this technology is faster clinical trials, requiring fewer patients and producing better evidence.
Charles completed his PhD in Biophysics at Harvard and has raised $17M to date for Unlearn.ai. We talk about digital twins, viewing clinical trials with a biophysics lens and some of the challenges in getting this technology adopted.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 joining InHealth Ventures, which is a $50M early stage fund looking to invest in companies who can transform health outcomes across Europe and the US.
We talk about venture capital funding for doctorepreneurs, the mythos of McKinsey and Ben gives his most high yield advice for medics trying to get investment — which is gold.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 details — as well as how he deals with failure.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 of his failures along the way. I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 compromise between living longer (longevity) and activities which will help it reproduce.
Interestingly, he also invented the INR in the 80s, which is a blood test used everyday by doctors to measure the clotting of a patient’s blood.
We talk about the disposable soma theory, how calorie restriction may extend lifespan, anti-ageing interventions which Prof Kirkwood finds interesting and how you would design a trial to show the efficacy of an anti ageing drug.
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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: https://www.cristagalli.com
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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 recently founded a global healthcare policy research centre: Future Health. The Centre is researching health and economic opportunities in building more resilient and preventative healthcare systems enabled by new technologies: https://www.futurehealth-research.com
We talk about whether healthcare is as unique as medics like to think, Richard’s learnings from his time as special advisor and his specific recommendations for getting clued up on health policy.
I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 an average of 7 years to diagnose — which is dubbed the diagnostic odyssey.
Rudy is super interesting and I pick his brain about how artificial intelligence can be used help reduce the diagnostic odyssey in rare diseases. I hope you enjoy.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 master. We speak about consciousness, brain computer interfaces as well as Professor Friston’s story and advice for young academics. I try to deconstruct some of what his enabled him to put forward so many novel, impactful ideas.
I hope you enjoy.
I recommend listening to Lex Fridman’s interview of Professor Friston. Lex asks much more intelligent questions: https://lexfridman.com/karl-friston/
Secondly there’s a wonderful Wired article written by Shaun Raviv which you won’t be able to put down: https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston-free-energy-principle-artificial-intelligence/
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 dementia using a mobile game.
We talk about his research — which in my opinion is fascinating but I delve a bit deeper — asking how ordinary people can themselves do fascinating research and not get stuck on mind numbingly boring projects. We speak about how he manages his time, how he sees work, mentorship and how he communicates and publicises his research so effectively.
I hope you enjoy.
Professor Spier's fiction book recommendation: Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 and collaborate.
Proximie has had incredible impact: it’s helped people in need across the world access surgical care, it’s been used by NHS surgeons who are self-isolating due to coronavirus and it’s also being used by the RAF.
Dr Nadine received the British Empire Medal in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours for her innovation in surgery.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 future of Medicine: the Creative Destruction of Medicine, The Patient Will See you Now and Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 dk to be a good leader?**
And not just the knee jerk response of: "of course not". I want to know the ins and outs, and maybe — if sometimes it’s useful to be a bit brash or abrasive — and not always be everyone’s best friend
So I’m on a mission to ask this question to all the people I admire in Medicine. Whether that’s clinicians, academics, policymakers or people in business. People of all backgrounds, races, genders etc. It should be really interesting.
I hope you enjoy the series — and as always reviews on iTunes are worth their weight in gold.
Inspired by Max Joseph's excellent short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRRvjZ_XNog
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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. We talk about passive income, physical and mental health, tools for productivity and why Yusef went on a 10 day silent meditation retreat.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
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 the world of online pharmacy. We talk about how to improve patient adherence, how Echo rose to the top despite not being the first company of its kind by a long shot, Stephen’s experience of making something cool but also accessible and how sometimes — you need to listen to all your friend’s advice, nod your head — and then ignore it all to take a big leap.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Sir Bruce Keogh was National Medical Director for over a decade — leading clinical policy and strategy as well as being responsible for clinical leadership, quality and innovation. Sir Bruce was a celebrated cardiac surgeon prior to this, and during his tenure as Medical Director — he was most notably responsible for making clinical outcomes the currency of the NHS.
He has been declared the most influential clinician in the NHS by the Health Service Journal for three years and was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003.
Honestly, I was nervous about speaking to someone of Sir Bruce’s stature. Fortunately, he is one of the kindest people I’ve interviewed — and I’m really happy to have captured his leadership philosophy, how he made decisions and decided what was important as Medical Director, and his life advice for medics with similar aspirations.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
How does a doctor start working for DeepMind/Google? 🤖
Joe Ledsam is a Clinician Scientist at Google Japan after formerly working at DeepMind. He started his career off as a doctor, before migrating to research and eventually coming to his current position.
He’s worked on some of the most influential medical deep learning papers to date — published in the likes of Nature. For many nerds in Medicine — he’s living the dream. He was recommended to me by Pearse Keane who I spoke to on episode #10, who described him as simply exceptional.
We talk about how Joe started working for DeepMind and then Google, how he actively seeks out fields he’s uncomfortable with, how the Simpsons influenced his life philosophy, why he wakes up at 2am and what he believes — are the dark horses in this field.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Dr Simon Eccles is the Chief Clinical Information Officer for Health and Care and Deputy CEO of NHS X. Amongst many responsibilities, he’s accountable for delivery of the Personal Health and Care 2020 programme, and the central expenditure for the NHS’s IT.
Whilst doing all of this, he also practices one day a week as a Consultant in Emergency Medicine.
He’s funny, he’s opinionated, he has a strong vision and he gives wonderful insight into what it’s like as a doctor policymaker. He talks about what he’s learned along the way, electronic health records, his views on blockchain and what he took away from his time at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Why should doctors learn how to code?
Josh is really cool. He’s an Australian doctor on a big mission — to empower medics with code.
Josh recently released Code Blue: An Introduction to Programming for Doctors. I highly, highly recommend picking this up for a 0–100 guide on coding for medics: https://gum.co/NMtSD
We talk about why you should learn how to code as a medic — but then I push back and challenge Josh — I ask him why you should bother learning how to code when a) no doctor I’ve spoken to in MedTech actually codes much themselves and b) when today, there are so many good no-code solutions out there
Finally Josh explains how to start coding for two very different types of medics:
Firstly, the hustler, the entrepreneur, the person who doesn’t care about the tools or computers — they just want to build their next startup.
Secondly, he explains the path for the academic, who wants to understand the nuts and bolts, build their own models, publish papers and work with companies like DeepMind/Google Health.
I hope you enjoy.
Find Josh
Twitter: @_JoshCase https://twitter.com/_JoshCase
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Where are the dark horses in medical AI? 🐴
Professor Geraint Rees is the Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences at UCL, Pro-Vice-Provost of AI and is also the director of UCL Business — its technology transfer arm. His research is primarily in cognitive neuroscience and he has been cited over 35,000 times with a h index of 93.
He sits at the intersection of academia, technology and business — so he has a really rich, birds eye perspective on MedTech.
I asked him which areas of AI in Medicine don’t get enough attention, the role of private companies in research and whether you need to work disproportionately hard to reach the upper echelons of a field.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Do we want a Silicon Valley for healthcare?
Professor Tony Young is the National Clinical Director for Innovation at NHS England, co-founder of the UK’s £500M MedTech Campus, founder of the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme and a consultant urological surgeon. Tony was awarded an OBE for services to clinical leadership in the 2019 New Year Honours List.
Tony has recently opened applications for the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur programme. Apply here: https://www.england.nhs.uk/aac/what-we-do/how-can-the-aac-help-me/clinical-entrepreneur-training-programme/
This is a really fun conversation — we cover Tony’s story, how and if the UK can make a Silicon Valley for healthcare and how to be charismatic.
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
A paper published in the Lancet Digital Health found that less than 1% of clinical AI studies reviewed were of sufficient quality to have confidence in their results. This is a huge problem.
Dr Xiao Liu and Professor Alastair Denniston are part of the team who published that study — and to tackle this this problem — they have today published the first international standards for the reporting of clinical AI trials. These are called SPIRIT-AI and CONSORT-AI and have today been published in Nature Medicine, the Lancet Digital Health and the BMJ.
The goal of these guidelines is to improve the quality of clinical AI studies and increase their transparency.
We talk about the general quality problem in clinical AI research, we talk about their guidelines and some of the recommendations within them — and also about what the future of clinical AI validation looks like.
Papers
Nature Medicine
CONSORT-AI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-1034-x
SPIRIT-AI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-1037-7
The Lancet Digital Health
CONSORT-AI: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(20)30218-1/fulltext
SPIRIT-AI: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(20)30219-3/fulltext
BMJ
CONSORT-AI: https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3164
SPIRIT-AI: https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3210
What's it like running a company which has raised $90M?
Dr Ben Maruthappu is the co-founder and CEO of Cera Care — a technology enabled home care company.
I could speak about Ben’s achievements and accolades for hours, but to give you a whistle stop tour — he is a successful doctorpreneur, has published some very influential papers, and has worked in health policy — perhaps most notably — he was an advisor to Simon Stevens (CEO of NHS England).
Ben was awarded an MBE for services to Health and Care technology in the 2020 Queen’s New Year Honours List.
We talk about how Ben got to where he is along with what he learned at every step. We also dive quite deep into what it’s actually like to be CEO of such a large company. This is one of my favourite interviews — because Ben is incredibly candid and gives lots of useful advice. I hope you enjoy.
Find Ben
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mahibenmaruthappu/
Cera Care: https://ceracare.co.uk
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Do you need to be a silverback gorilla to be a good leader? 🦍
Professor David Lomas is the Vice Provost (Health) at University College London and Head of UCL Medical School. He is also a hugely accomplished academic with his most notable work focusing on alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency. He has a h-index of 95.
We talk about lots of things — like the future of medical education, what makes a good leader and how to make good decisions.
Find Prof David Lomas
UCL: https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=DALOM96
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Do you want the granular step-by-step on how to launch your own MedTech startup?
Dr Krishan Ramdoo was an ENT Surgeon before co-founding TympaHealth; the world’s first all in one hearing health assessment system.
It’s essentially a digital otoscope (a scope that helps visualise inside the ear). Traditionally this was an analogue device, so no one else could see what you saw when you examined the ear — but with the Tympahealth system, you can see what the scope is looking at on your phone screen and then save that video to the patient’s records.
Unlike other similar devices, you can also use it to remove ear wax. It was the winner of the global UX design award and it’s seriously beautiful. You can go to tympahealth.com to see what it looks like.
TympaHealth have been very active in the battle against COVID, and the system has been trialled in the UCLH Trust in the country’s first tele-otology service.
This conversation is basically a deep dive into how Krishan has achieved what he has with TympaHealth. How he went from an idea in his head to his device being used by 1000s of patients as well as by Boots Hearing Care.
He’s a masterful storyteller — I hope you enjoy.
Find Krishan
TympaHealth: https://www.tympahealth.com
Krishan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krishan-ramdoo-10086979/
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
What does the future radiologist look like? What does everyone get wrong when regulating their AI startup?
Dr Hugh Harvey trained as a consultant radiologist and is now the managing director of Hardian Health; a health-tech consultancy firm.
He has had an incredible career, sitting at the interface of Medicine and technology. He was headhunted by Dr Eric Topol to co-chair the Topol Review, he sits on the board of Nature Digital Medicine and was formerly head of regulatory affairs at Babylon Health.
He has twice been awarded science writer of the year by the Institute of Cancer Research in London and you can find him on Twitter @DrHughHarvey, where he candidly shares his thoughts on medical AI and clinical validation amongst other things. Seriously, I recommend following him.
Essentially he understands the worlds of AI, Medicine, business as well as regulation and validation. This is a really interesting conversation — hope you enjoy.
Find Hugh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrHughHarvey
Hardian Health: https://hardianhealth.com
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
You're an average medical student with no connections — how do you get published!?
Congratulations to Azeem who was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to Medical Education during COVID-19
Dr Azeem Alam completed his surgical AFP training in London and is the co-founder of BiteMedicine — the medical knowledge platform. He shares his step-by-step framework on getting published without a leg up.
Find Azeem
BiteMedicine: https://www.bitemedicine.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azeemalam/
Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ngjub5Ntqk
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
How can a surgeon assist in an operation across the world — using their web browser?
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 and collaborate.
Proximie has had incredible impact: it’s helped people in need across the world access surgical care, it’s been used by NHS surgeons who are self-isolating due to coronavirus and it’s also being used by the RAF.
Dr Nadine received the British Empire Medal in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours for her innovation in surgery
This is a really cool interview: we start off by talking about augmented reality in surgery before moving onto Dr Nadine’s transition from a plastic surgeon to a CEO, some business strategy and finally her advice for fledgling doctorpreneurs.
Find Dr Nadine:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrNadz
Proximie: https://www.proximie.com
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
How could better understanding your internal state improve your mental health?
Dr David Plans is a lecturer in Organisational Neuroscience and CEO of BioBeats; a company on a mission to free people from mental suffering. He’s completing his second PhD in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and has raised over $6M to turn his academic research into a bustling company.
This is a really interesting conversation in which I’m completely out of my depth. We start by discussing David’s story and his view of hustle culture and how enhancing peoples’ interoception (which is loosely defined as understanding the internal state of your body) could improve their mental health.
Thank you to Elise Plans for the music you hear.
Find Dr David Plans
BioBeats: https://biobeats.com
David's Personal Website: http://www.davidplans.com
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Professor Shafi Ahmed is the world’s most watched surgeon.
He has live-streamed operations using Google Glass, the Snapchat Spectacles — and even virtual reality technology. He’s really at the cutting edge of surgical innovation so it was a real privilege to speak to him.
He is the co-founder of Medical Realities; a company which specialises in surgical VR and AR tech. He has spoken at Wired Health, TEDx — he leads charity work in his native Bangladesh, he’s setting up a hospital of the future in Bolivia.
He has consulted for Google, PwC, Roche — he has advised the NHS on the Long Term Plan and was awarded the Future NHS Award by members of Parliament in 2018.
Find Professor Shafi Ahmed
Website: https://surgeon.ai
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ShafiAhmed5
Wired Health Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vftA-_c1hYc
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
How do you enact systems-level change within the NHS?
Dr Owain Hughes was an ENT registrar before he decided to do something bold: fix NHS referrals. But systems-level solutions aren't as simple as just making an app... here's how Cinapsis did it.
Find Dr Owain Hughes:
Cinapsis: https://www.cinapsis.org
Twitter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/owainrhyshughes
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
What would you be working on if you were a medical student today?
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 future of Medicine: the Creative Destruction of Medicine, The Patient Will See you Now and Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. This conversation was a lot of fun — hope you enjoy.
Find Dr Eric Topol:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EricTopol
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
How do you forge your own career path as a doctor?
Dr James Somauroo is a former anaesthetics/ICU doctor and the founder of the healthtech agency: somX. He writes for Forbes and is also the host of the Health-tech podcast — the biggest podcast in this space with listeners in over 100 countries.
Find Dr James Somauroo:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-somauroo/
The Health-tech Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-health-tech-podcast/id1438968893
somX: https://somx.co.uk
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
How did a Paediatrician become the Managing Director of NHS Services at Babylon Health?
We talk about Umang's advice for medics entering the business world, how to keep your clinical job, Babylon's validation and some incredible advice on crafting your own story.
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Find Dr Umang Patel:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drumangpatel/
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
How do you achieve peak performance as a medical student, doctor or clinical academic?
Professor Neil Sebire works at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London — the country's leading childrens' research hospital. He's published over 700 peer reviewed papers, has a h-index of 88 and 32,000+ citations. Here's everything he's learnt along the way.
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Find Professor Sebire:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-sebire-64780435/
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Cellen is bringing medical cannabis to UK patients. I spoke to Dr Benjamin Viaris de Lesegno who is a French-trained NHS doctor as well as the co-founder and CMO of Cellen.
The first half of this conversation covers the landscape of medical cannabis in the UK and its clinical need. We then talk about Benjamin's advice for fellow doctorpreneurs — and why 45 might be the best age to found your startup.
Harvard Business Review article mentioned: https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-startup-founder-is-45
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Find Benjamin:
Cellen: https://www.cellenhealth.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-viaris-de-lesegno-52833161/
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
How do you run a successful startup and code academy — all whilst completing your final year at Imperial College Medical School?
Harvinder Power is the co-founder and CEO of Motics — a company which brings physiotherapy into the digital era. He was the winner at the Kickstart Global Incubator, the McKinsey Venture Academy, the UCL VC Fund amongst many other accolades.
In this conversation, I tease out the trials and tribulations of a medical student entrepreneur. We talk about how he started Motics, how you convince patients to do something they're not doing and what medics can learn from engineers and marketers.
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Find Harvinder:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvinder-power-70800b124/
Motics: https://www.motics.co.uk
CodeMD: https://www.codemd.co.uk
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Ali has reached medic nirvana. He has over 770,000 YouTube subscribers, a successful business (6med), one of my favourite podcasts (Not Overthinking It) and is an all round wise man. He's managed to diversify so that Medicine is not his livelihood — it's a hobby he can approach on his own terms.
His content started with advice for prospective and fledgling medical students — although he has now expanded into tech, productivity and entrepreneurship. You're going to love this episode if you're a wannabe creative, entrepreneur or want to get out of Medicine's rat race and play your own game.
I've been chasing Ali for a long time because I knew he would provide so much value. He doesn't disappoint.
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Find Ali
Website/Newsletter: https://aliabdaal.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/Sepharoth64/videos
Not Overthinking It Podcast: https://www.notoverthinking.com
Instagram: @AliAbdaal // Twitter @AliAbdaal
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
How do you convert an idea in medical school into a company that just raised $11M and has over 1 million users?
Sarim, Yusuf and Maroof were three medical students at Imperial College London. They wanted to help people quit smoking by delivering gold-standard addiction therapy digitally.
Fast forward to today and they’ve expanded across the Atlantic and have over 1 million users, as well as becoming a multi addiction platform tackling smoking, alcohol and opioid addiction.
We talk about Sarim's story, how to bring an idea into fruition and his advice for entrepreneurial medics.
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Find Sarim
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarim-siddiqui-64b4b8103/
QuitGenius: https://www.quitgenius.com
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
What's management consulting really like (all expensed trips to Vegas)!? How do you get your digital health solution into the NHS? And why do so many world-class performers have a performance/executive coach? This week's episode was a lot of fun, and you're going to love it if you want to hear advice from a super accomplished doctorpreneur.
Dr Charlotte Lee is the UK director at Big Health, who generate $10M in revenue and are helping millions achieve good mental health — digitally. They have 12 RCTs under their belt, and are most famous for Sleepio, which digitally delivers CBT for insomnia. In a former life, Charlotte was a medical doctor, Darzi Fellow and management consultant at KPMG.
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Find Charlotte
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlottelee/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrChar_Lee
Big Health: https://www.bighealth.com
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
Isn't it strange when everyone is raving about something — but you just — don't get it? That's the position Dr David Watkins (@DrMurphy11) found himself in in 2017.
Babylon had launched in the UK and promised to provide the powers of AI and telemedicine to the NHS. Babylon lets you video consult with a doctor, often on the same day. This was slightly controversial, but not compared to its other head.
Babylon had developed a sophisticated chatbot AI. After a game of 20 questions, the chatbot would suggest a diagnosis — although crucially (from a regulatory point of view) it wouldn't diagnose you.
You would then be directed (triaged) to appropriate care. Mild headache and flu-like symptoms? No problem! Stay at home and take paracetamol. One-sided weakness and slurring your words? Call 999 🚑
Dr Watkins installed the app and began testing it. The details of this testing are disputed — Babylon who refer to him as a 'troll' claim that he ran 2400 tests, Dr Watkins claims just hundreds.
More insidiously, Dr Watkins began to notice mistakes the chatbot was making — mistakes that no doctor would ever make. In one test, a 59-year old male smoker presents with central chest pain and nausea. Cookie-cutter symptoms of a heart attack, and he is duly warned.
The exact same situation but this time, the patient is a woman—
She is warned of a panic attack.
This week's podcast is the story of Dr Watkin's battle against Babylon Health.*
Views expressed are those of Dr Watkins'
This week's episode presents a single side of the story. For context, Babylon have done a lot of good in the world. They've brought affordable healthcare to Rwanda, created a clinical AI fellowship for doctors and generally offer lucrative remote working opportunities.
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You can find Dr Watkins on Twitter @DrMurphy11. The title of this podcast episode is adapted from Dr Watkins' talk at the Royal Society of Medicine: "Cowboys and unicorns in #DigitalHealth — why validation is more important than valuation".
You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io
How do you get into MedTech and collaborate with DeepMind/Google Health to lead world-renowned Deep Learning research? All to help stop people from going blind?
This is 30 minutes of pure gold — Dr Pearse Keane's advice on how to get into exciting Deep Learning projects, approaches that worked for him and books he recommends.
Dr Pearse Keane is a consultant ophthalmologist and NIHR Clinician Scientist at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. Pearse was responsible for starting the collaboration between Moorfields and DeepMind. Some of his most famous research uses deep learning to identify retinal disease from OCT scans.
Clinically applicable deep learning for diagnosis and referral in retinal disease: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-018-0107-6)
Ever wondered if astronauts are honest with their doctors? Or what it feels like to look out of the window at Earth?
Helen Sharman was the first British astronaut. Project Juno, was a joint Soviet-British programme which took Helen to the Mir Space Station. Helen was working as a research technologist for Mars (the confectionery company) before hearing about the opportunity on the radio.
We talked about the selection and training, what it’s like being in Space and the peculiar doctor-astronaut relationship.
What’s AI? What’s machine learning? What’s deep learning? This week’s episode is a crash course on machine learning for medics.
Dr Chris Lovejoy is a doctor, data scientist and content creator. He runs some exceptional ‘machine learning for medics’ day courses in London which is where I met him — and he also puts out loads of great content on his YouTube channel and newsletter. He also recently published a systematic review in the BMJ titled: AI Versus Clinicians: a Systematic Review.
If you’re someone who has heard of concepts in AI and machine learning, but don’t necessarily understand them — Chris is the very best person I could think of to help explain them.
I sat down with Chris to go from zero -> hero in machine learning as it relates to healthcare. Hopefully you'll get a better idea of what some of the buzzwords and key ideas are, how you can interpret a medical machine learning paper — and where you can go to keep your finger on the pulse and to learn more.
Find Chris
Website: https://chrislovejoy.me
Newsletter: https://chrislovejoy.substack.com/p/artificial-intelligence-in-drug-discovery
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDoIFHMTKsgIweO-OZt1ecw
Resources and Links Mentioned
Luke Oakden-Rayner's post explaining metrics used to measure machine learning algorithm performance: https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2017/12/06/do-machines-actually-beat-doctors-roc-curves-and-performance-metrics/
Eric Topol: Twitter and book
Chris's BMJ Paper: https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m689
Doctor Penguin Newsletter: http://doctorpenguin.com/about
Andrew Ng's Machine Learning Course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning
AI for Medicine Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/ai-for-medicine
Find Me
www.bigpicturemedicine.co.uk
Twitter @MustafaSultan
What are the realities of trying to procure PPE during a pandemic?
As the government has given the NHS a 'blank cheque' to fight against COVID-19 — why can't we just throw money at the PPE shortage? To get answers, I spoke to Dr Alisa Pearlstone — the project director at NHS Hero Support — a pop up, emergency PPE delivery service. They’ve teamed up with the Doctors Association and Letsbeatcovid to help fight the PPE shortage.
You can donate to NHS Hero Support at www.nhsherosupport.co.uk
Links to socials and the podcast newsletter can be found at: www.bigpicturemedicine.co.uk
What do you when hospitals are running out of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and your colleagues are at risk?
Ryan and his team at Oxford Inspired have created a PPE mask out of scuba masks. They plan to deliver 3000 of these to the frontlines — but how do they work? And why are they having to step in?
You can donate to the fundraiser at: www.oxford-inspired.com and you can find Ryan's innovation journal of the future at www.weshare.healthcare
More about reverse innovation: https://www.bmj.com/content/367/bmj.l6205
"I'm going to go out on a limb and say that AI isn't going to get us out of the covid-19 crisis." Natasha Loder, Health Policy Editor at the Economist.
Except, some researchers are trying just that. They're using deep learning to read CT scans and try to diagnose COVID-19, as well as building other types of models to predict the prognosis (mortality, length of hospital stay etc.) of the disease.
A number of these models have been published as preprints or in academic journals — but Laure's team found that they were poorly reported, at a high risk of bias and and highly optimistic about their results.
You can find Laure's systematic review here (available open access):
https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1328
Curious about how the UK made the decision to the lock the country down? It was made using epidemiological models. One research team has been particularly influential in their response — the Imperial College team led by Professor Neil Ferguson. Their model predicted that an unchecked COVID-19 epidemic would overwhelm the NHS and result in 500,000 UK deaths. They suggested that we may need to have some form of social distancing for 12 out of the next 18 months.
More recently, an Oxford University team led by Professor Sunetra Gupta published their own model. Any model on covid-19 has to make some assumptions — Imperial looked at the deaths we’ve had in the UK and assumed that COVID-19 hadn’t infected much of the UK, but had quite a high death rate. Oxford assumed the opposite — they constructed a model which assumed that COVID-19 had infected most of the population, but had a relatively low death rate. This was picked up in news outlets such as the Financial Times — “Coronavirus may have infected half of UK population“.
To find out how these types of COVID-19 models work, what their limitations are and how we should interpret them — I called up Dr James Hay — who’s a computational epidemiologist at the Harvard’s School of Public Health. For the record, this conversation was recorded on the 31st March 2020.
Imperial COVID-19 Model: Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID- 19 mortality and healthcare demand. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf
Oxford COVID-19 Model: Fundamental principles of epidemic spread highlight the immediate need for large-scale serological surveys to assess the stage of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.24.20042291v1
Financial Times article mentioning Oxford model: https://www.ft.com/content/5ff6469a-6dd8-11ea-89df-41bea055720b
What can 2 million retinal images and a machine-learning algorithm achieve? Early-detection of Alzheimers—at least that's what Dr Siegfried Wagner along with a team led by Dr Pearse Keane at the Moorfields Eye Hospital are working towards.
We discuss the study at Moorfields, before going down a deep dive into how a relatively novel AI technique—Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can be used in Medicine. You may have seen a number of 'deep fakes' online, all made using GANs. But what legitimate uses do they have in Medicine and research?
Mentioned Links
AlzEye Study: https://readingcentre.org/workstreams/artificial_intelligence_hub/alzeye/
Economist article on AlzEye: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/12/18/a-system-based-on-ai-will-scan-the-retina-for-signs-of-alzheimers
Rotterdam Study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2685868
Biobank Study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2685869
Predicting age and sex from retinal fundus images: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-018-0195-0
A professor of Pathology who has accepted his impending redundancy from AI image recognition—Professor Neil Sebire is also the Chief Research Information Officer at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH); the country's leading children's research hospital. We talk about the future of pathology and paediatrics in the context of AI, how he partnered with Microsoft to create the GOSH in Minecraft and I finish off by asking him for his advice on academic success and getting published.
Blockchain (the technology behind Bitcoin) can be difficult to understand. It's been surrounded by cultish hype and it's not immediately obvious how it relates to healthcare. In this episode, Dr Abdullah Albeyatti gives an 'Explain-Like-I'm-Five-Years-Old' explanation of blockchain and covers how it can be used to manage patient records, in clinical trials and even on the organ donation registry.
He explains his journey from a doctor with an idea, to CEO and cofounder of MedicalChain; an electronic health record system which uses BlockChain technology to put the patient in control of their medical data. It's a fascinating story, especially since they've had tremendous success raising $24 million of funding and are now on the approved online framework for the NHS as a supplier. There's also lots of life advice for doctors and medical students looking to work in MedTech.