Big Picture Medicine

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. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io