Big Picture Medicine

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