A scannable digest of 53 Pharma Prescribed conversations — organized by category, with a short summary of each episode. Perfect for catching up or sharing in your next newsletter.
Ashish Rishi — founder and CEO of Unwritten Health — on the term he coined for what clinical research owes the people it leaves out, the diagnosis that started it all, and why he'd rather be honest than polished.
Ashish was 18 when a consultant gave his father six months to live in a two-minute conversation, handed him a flyer, and moved on. His father lived six years — long enough to see Ashish through most of university, three months short of graduation. Years later, writing a publication strategy for a phase three prostate cancer trial, Ashish realised the lead investigator was his father's own consultant. His father had never been told the trial existed. Nothing in the inclusion criteria would have stopped it. That gap became the rest of his career.
Inclusion debt just compounds as the cycle goes on.
Inclusion debt, defined
His term for what happens when patient voice is skipped at every stage rather than one. It starts in early discovery, where unmet need gets defined by a focus group of eight to ten patient experts underpinning programmes worth billions. It compounds through protocol amendments, through recruitment budgets thrown at social platforms that skew toward people already willing to share data online, and by market access, where the value dossier tells one population's story. By then, he argues, it's too late to correct — the debt has already been spent.
Data that doesn't talk to itself
Unwritten Health's Equity Engine works community-first: gurdwaras, mosques, temples, African and Caribbean church and ministry networks, built one relationship at a time toward a UK panel now past 6,500 people. He's candid about the trust problem underneath it — the UK Biobank breach comes up unprompted in community conversations — and his answer is to keep showing up as a commercial entity that says so plainly, rather than pretending otherwise.
AI without the disingenuous design
He tested a prostate cancer recruitment flyer through the platform: a Black man in a polo shirt, smiling on a golf course with his wife. The feedback came back immediately — men living with prostate cancer aren't playing golf, and if they were, they wouldn't be smiling through it. It's the kind of design failure that reads fine in a meeting and fails on contact with the people it's for. He's now working with Lancaster University on models that synthesise patient data without importing bias or hallucinating conclusions, including where the data centres physically sit.
Ashish Rishi is founder and CEO of Unwritten Health, a Manchester-based patient experience data platform. He sits on the scientific advisory board of IHI-READI (REpresentative Clinical Research, Advancing Inclusivity in Europe) and the equity committee of the US Prader-Willi Syndrome Association.
Previous issue · Episode notes · Guest: Louise Callin
The photo shouldn't be a memory test
Louise Callin — founder and CEO of ReelLife Conversations — on dementia care, the phrase she trains carers to stop saying, and building technology that automates an instinct rather than a database.
Louise spent nearly 30 years leading technology and transformation for global corporations before her mum's dementia journey pulled her toward something more direct. Laying photos out on the coffee table, she could always find the next picture to keep the conversation moving — not through faces alone, but through colour, object and place. When she asked a carer why the albums sat unopened between visits, the answer was simple: without the backstory, she didn't know what to say. That gap is where the company started.
The photos shouldn't be a memory test. They are there as a supporting actor in the conversation.
The reframe is the whole product
Ask someone with dementia if they remember something and the failure to recall reads as a loss, every time. Flip "do you remember when" to "I remember when" and the pressure disappears — whether or not the other person remembers anything at all. The goal isn't to surface memories; it's to encourage interaction without fear of failure.
Automating an instinct, not a database
Photos go into ReelLife's family admin portal, facial recognition groups faces so a relative names each cluster once, and location data is checked and corrected. The platform then generates conversation prompts tuned so the next photo picks up the same thread. Always having to think of the next thing to say puts real strain on carers, and social care already struggles badly with retention — tools that support the moment of caring, rather than the logistics around it, are still rare.
An investor case that holds two things at once
Venture capital wants volume and return; dementia care is personal and slow. Louise's answer was to make the business model itself the ethical argument: a low monthly subscription at scale, aimed at a genuine gap, since most existing technology covers medication tracking and safety monitoring rather than the moment of connection. She also pushed back gently on framing dementia as a disease that affects women more than men — the more accurate picture is who ends up doing the caring.
Louise Callin is the founder and CEO of ReelLife Conversations, a social care technology company helping people living with dementia connect through photos.
Previous issue · Episode notes · Guest: Andreas Beust
Pull back the curtain
Andreas Beust — CEO of the CRO GCP-Service International — on the unlikely path from the biostats desk to the top job, why communication is the skill that sets scientists apart, and making an opaque industry more accessible.
Andreas Beust is CEO and managing director of GCP-Service International, a Bremen-based CRO working across medicinal products, medical devices and in vitro diagnostics, president of the Association of International CROs, and a guest lecturer at the University of Bremen. He also, by his own cheerful admission, isn't entirely sure how a man who started at the biostatistics desk ended up running the company.
Those that can communicate generally tend to stand out.
From the biostats desk to CEO
Andreas is refreshingly honest about how it happened: saying yes to almost everything, a good deal of luck, persistence, and an unusually far-sighted founder — also an Andreas — who, well short of retirement age, deliberately began planning his succession because clinical research moves too fast to leave leadership to chance. It's a reminder that careers rarely follow the plan, and that the willingness to take the next thing on matters more than the map.
The skill nobody teaches statisticians
His sharpest observation is that, among technically capable people, the ones who can communicate are the ones who stand out. In a field full of brilliant specialists, the rarer ability to translate the science for sites, sponsors and patients is what moves a career — and, not coincidentally, what makes a trial actually work. Sample size matters enormously at the start of a study; so, it turns out, does being able to explain why.
Pulling back the curtain
Beyond the day job, Andreas's mission is to make clinical research less opaque. Having stumbled into the industry by accident, as many do, he found a world that's hugely impactful yet rarely well understood from the outside, and he wants it to be more shared and more communal. That instinct also shapes how he sees the CRO's future: shifting from cleanup-heavy monitoring and source-data verification toward a genuinely data-driven way of managing trials.
Andreas Beust is the CEO and managing director of GCP-Service International, a Bremen-based CRO, and president of the Association of International CROs.
Previous issue · Episode notes · Guest: Graham Allcott
The thing quietly deciding whether a team catches its own mistakes isn't in any SOP
Graham Allcott on why kindness, not niceness, is an operational lever — not a wellbeing nicety.
Most of what we obsess over in clinical research is technical: systems, standards, the mechanics of getting to Database Lock. This week's guest made me sit with something less comfortable — that the thing quietly deciding whether a team catches its own mistakes isn't in any SOP.
Graham Allcott, founder of Think Productive - Global Learning Partner and author of KIND, argues that kindness, not niceness, is an operational lever, not a wellbeing nicety. It's the least "pharma" conversation I've had, and one of the most impactful.
Trust and kindness are rocket fuel.
Graham challenges a belief most of us have quietly internalised: that success comes from being ruthless. His argument is that the ruthless archetype isn't just unpleasant. It's inefficient.
Kind is not nice
Nice is about being liked. Kind is about being honest in a way that helps the other person. Nice avoids the difficult conversation; kind has it early, before it becomes a CAPA. Nice tells a junior data manager their listing looks fine; kind tells them where it doesn't, and why it matters. In an industry that runs on accuracy, that distinction is about data quality.
The mechanism: psychological safety
Kindness earns the "rocket fuel" billing because it builds psychological safety — the sense that you can flag a problem or challenge a decision without being punished for it.
Anyone who's worked on a trial that went wrong can usually point to a moment where someone knew. Knew the query rate was climbing. Knew the timeline was fantasy. And said nothing, because the environment had taught them that speaking up cost more than staying quiet. The errors don't disappear; they surface later, at lock, in an audit finding, in a regulatory question you can't answer well. Kindness lowers the cost of speaking up early.
Retention and critical thinking
The second-order effect is people. People don't leave the work, they leave the way they're treated while doing it — and in a business where trial knowledge lives in individuals rather than SOPs, retention is capability.
It also protects thinking. In fear-led cultures, people optimise for not being wrong, which means doing what they're told and thinking no further. That's the opposite of what you want from the people closest to the data — the ones who catch the "that's odd" before it becomes an unblinding risk.
Why this belongs on a pharma podcast
Every system we deploy ultimately depends on people telling each other the truth quickly. That's a cultural capability, not a technical one. Graham makes the case for it in language that survives contact with a P&L — and turns it practical, laying out concrete principles for engineering a kinder team rather than hoping one emerges from a values poster.
The uncomfortable takeaway, for me, is that most teams I've worked in were quietly getting a fair chunk of this wrong — mistaking pressure for rigour, and nice for kind.
Graham Allcott is the founder of Think Productive and the author of KIND: The Quiet Power of Kindness at Work.
Amelia Wrighton of Suicide&Co on why grief after suicide is different, the help that should exist from day one, and the myth that asking someone directly plants the idea.
This episode discusses suicide and bereavement. Support resources are listed alongside it. Some episodes are harder to introduce than others. My sister, Naomi, died by suicide in 2024, and Suicide&Co supported my family from almost the first day — so this conversation with its co-founder and CEO, Amelia Wrighton, is a personal one.
Amelia built the charity out of her own loss, to be the support she'd needed and never had. We talk about why grief after suicide is different, why the right time to reach out is day one, and the difference a space with no judgement can make. She also dismantles one persistent myth worth carrying with you: asking someone directly whether they're having thoughts of suicide never plants the idea — it gives them permission to speak.
This was not a detached interview for me to sit through. My sister, Naomi, died by suicide in September 2024, and my father died 203 days later. In the middle of that, I found Suicide&Co — I think it was the same day, or the day after, we lost Naomi — and it has framed my family's grief ever since. So when I say this episode matters to me, I mean it more than usual.
Amelia Wrighton is the co-founder and CEO of Suicide&Co, the UK's national charity for people bereaved by suicide. She built it out of her own experience: she lost her mother when she was nineteen, went largely without support, and later founded the charity — in 2020, with her co-founder Emma — to be the thing she'd needed and never had. Her whole approach runs on a single, quietly radical idea.
You are not alone. You do deserve support.
Why grief after suicide is different
Amelia is careful to say it isn't a "grief Olympics" — no loss outranks another. But bereavement by suicide does carry things others often don't. It's sudden, and it shocks even families who feared it might come. It sits under a long shadow of stigma, so the people you expected to show up sometimes go quiet and disappear — which leaves isolation and shame on top of the grief. And it's emotionally complex in a way few of us are equipped for: you're left trying to understand a mind you can no longer ask.
Support from day one
The idea I most want people to take from this is Amelia's answer to "when should someone reach out?" Her answer is now day one or two. Not because everyone wants counselling immediately, but because early contact resets two foundations: that you are deserving of support, and that you are not alone. Get those wrong and everything that follows is harder.
Practically, that looked like this for us: a free Help Hub and app to reach for at 3am, then flexible early bereavement support — short, regular sessions built around the fact that holding down any routine in the first weeks is impossible — and, further on, twelve sessions of proper counselling. All free. It didn't make the journey easy. Nothing does. It kept us company on a very hard one.
A space with no judgement
Both Amelia and I are people who talk — to friends, family, strangers. But she draws a sharp line between that and talking to a professional, and I've felt it. Friends and family want to fix you; they can't help it, and neither can I when it's someone I love. A counsellor is trained to do the harder thing: sit with the pain and hold the space so you can explore it yourself, without anyone tidying it up or telling you it doesn't make sense. That non-judgement is where the work actually happens.
She uses a metaphor I keep returning to. Picture the trauma as your hand pressed flat against your face — it's all you can see, and everything else is blurred. The work isn't to remove the hand. It's to move it slowly back to arm's length: still there, still clearly yours, but with room to see joy, perspective and the rest of your life around it again.
Ask the question
If there's one thing worth carrying out of this newsletter, it's this: asking someone directly whether they're having thoughts of suicide does not plant the idea. It's a persistent myth, and it's wrong. What the question can do is give someone permission to say, honestly and maybe for the first time, that they're struggling. It's a genuine skill and it takes practice to feel confident — Amelia points to formal training such as ASIST — but the myth stops far too many people from ever opening their mouth.
Who the system misses
For a healthcare audience, the systemic picture is the part to sit with. Around 70% of people who die by suicide are men, and only about one in five who died had been in contact with mental health services at all — yet most people in those services are women. The people at highest risk are largely not reaching the system. At the same time, Amelia argues women get overlooked at specific, high-risk moments — perinatal mental health and domestic abuse among them — where the same shame and silence keep people from putting their hand up. England's suicide prevention strategy flags these groups; the gap is who actually gets seen.
Orange
Amelia and I discovered, halfway through, that we're both connected to orange — for her, simply a colour that lifts her; for me, the colour of Naomi, who used to run for charity in an orange vest. After she died I bought a wardrobe of orange. I nearly wore an orange jumper to record this. It's a small thing, and it's everything: grief doesn't only live in the hard conversations. It lives in a colour, and in the people who understand why.
I never asked for this journey. But if this episode nudges one person to reach out a little earlier than I knew how to, it will have been worth recording.
If you need support
You don't have to be in crisis to deserve help. If any of this is close to home, these are good places to start.
Samaritans — for anyone struggling to cope. Call 116 123 free, any time, day or night (UK & ROI). Or email jo@samaritans.org.
Suicide&Co — for anyone bereaved by suicide. Help Hub, free counselling and the free Sidekick app at suicideandco.org.
In an emergency — if someone's life is at immediate risk, call 999.
Amelia Wrighton is the co-founder and CEO of Suicide&Co, the UK's national charity supporting adults bereaved by suicide.
Dermot Whelan on panic attacks, busyness as a status symbol, and why curiosity beats willpower — in a real sense, the episode that started this podcast.
The podcast was built on a simple premise: in an industry run on data, protocols and pressure, we rarely stop to ask the human questions. This episode is where that idea came from. I first met Dermot Whelan — broadcaster, comedian and full-time meditation teacher — at a conference in Prague, where he closed with a short meditation on busyness that landed harder than anything else in the room.
In this conversation we get into panic attacks, why "rest and digest" is as real as fight-or-flight, busyness as a modern status symbol, and his sharpest reframe of all: treat your own stress the way our industry treats data — take the information, don't judge it, and get curious. Practical, funny, and quietly useful for anyone running hot.
Dermot is one of Ireland's most recognisable broadcasters — a comedian, best-selling author and, for the last few years, a full-time meditation teacher who walked away from a chart-topping radio show at the peak of its ratings. His mission is deceptively small: make the techniques for calming your own nervous system simple enough that anyone will actually use them. Or, in his words, learn to "make friends with your stress response."
Stress has a terrible marketing team.
Stress has a terrible marketing team
Dermot's central reframe is one most of us in high-pressure roles have never been offered. We're drilled on fight-or-flight — stress is bad, stress will kill you — and almost never told about the opposite state the body can drop into, rest-and-digest, which he cheerfully rebrands "Matthew McConaughey mode." The point isn't that stress is fine. It's that our perception of stress does much of the damage.
He cites a large US study of around 30,000 adults, later made famous by a well-known TED talk: people who reported high stress and believed stress was harmful were markedly more likely to die prematurely. The group who reported the same high stress but saw it as useful outlived everyone — including the people who'd tried to avoid stress altogether. The stress wasn't the variable. The story they told about it was.
The part a pharma audience should steal
Dermot's advice is to treat your own stress the way our industry treats a dataset: take the information, don't judge it, and see what you can transform it into. We're rigorous and non-judgemental with trial data and merciless with our own. His fix is curiosity — which, not incidentally, is the one behaviour that only shows up once you're out of a stress state.
It's practical, not abstract. He talks about "peace pinchers" — the small, personal, often invisible stressors that set the tone for a whole day. His own example is almost embarrassing: his fitness tracker showed his stress on stage in front of 2,000 people was low, while the daily scramble to leave the house registered at double that. The intervention wasn't a retreat. It was getting up fifteen minutes earlier.
Busyness is now the status symbol
Both of us have watched colleagues wear exhaustion as a badge of honour, and Dermot has the research for why. He points to Columbia Business School's Silvia Bellezza, whose work shows we now signal status through busyness — the 20-minute reply to "how are you?", the phrase "good busy." A century ago, status was leisure; the Downton Abbey set boasted about how little they did. Now "I have no time for myself" is the flex. Once you've seen it, as he warns, you can't unsee it in a single team meeting.
Protect the thing you'll cut first
The most useful operational idea for anyone running hot is his framing of recovery as non-negotiable infrastructure. The walk, the workout, the thing that resets you — that's a foundational block in your Jenga tower, and it's invariably the first thing we sacrifice the moment a "more important" Zoom appears. He runs off-work activities through a filter he calls DRAMA, worth keeping somewhere findable:
Detachment — genuinely unrelated to the job
Relaxation — it actually settles the system
Autonomy — it's for you, not your boss or your kids
Mastery — you're learning something, using a different part of the brain
Meaning — it adds a sense of purpose
Affiliation — you're doing it with, or for, other people
If your "downtime" ticks none of these, that's why you don't feel better after it.
Check in with your heart
Asked for his one golden rule in life and business, he doesn't reach for anything strategic. It's "check in with your heart" — brought down from the head for ten seconds before a decision. He's fully aware how that lands in a corporate room ("I've now lost half the room"), and says it anyway. The brain, in his framing, is a great servant of the heart and not much more.
We closed the episode the way we opened the friendship — with a sixteen-second box-breathing exercise, the kind the Navy SEALs call tactical breathing. It's the whole thesis in miniature: one small, repeatable signal to your nervous system that you're safe, deployable before the difficult conversation or the presentation you're dreading.
I'll be honest that this was not a detached interview to record. Dermot led with kindness toward me at a genuinely low point, and it changed the trajectory of what I do. If there's a takeaway for our sector, it's that the systems, standards and timelines all still depend on people who are regulated enough to think clearly. That's not soft. It's operational.
Dermot Whelan is a broadcaster, comedian and meditation teacher, and the author of Mindful and Busy and Wrecked.
Founder and CEO of Unwritten Health on the term he coined for what clinical research owes the people it leaves out, the Equity Engine's 6,500-strong community panel, and why he'd rather be honest than polished.
Founder and CEO of ReelLife Conversations on dementia care, why "I remember when" beats "do you remember when", and technology that automates an instinct rather than a database.
CEO of GCP-Service International on the unlikely path from the biostats desk to the top job, why communication is the skill that sets scientists apart, and making an opaque industry more accessible.
My namesake — Qualified Person and co-founder of Help Me GMP — on ready-to-administer medicines, freeing nurses to nurse, and the personal reason he makes medicines at all.
Head of Patient Engagement at Evinova on the mental-health access gap, why lived experience belongs in the room, and building 'Safe Space' inside AstraZeneca.
The founder of Clinical Trial Scan on treating patient enrolment as an engineered system you can model before a study starts — and the true cost of a patient.
A functional-medicine practitioner with thirty years' experience on getting to the root cause instead of masking symptoms, and listening to patients in their own language.
Thirty years in statistical programming — on AI's real ceiling in pharma, the guardrails that make it usable, and why the industry's long marriage to SAS is finally loosening.
The overlooked link between head injury and men's mental health, the Headstrong campaign born from losing her brother, and symptoms with physical roots we walk past.
35 years across CROs and pharma on making risk-based quality management make sense, and why a clinical trial is best understood as a people-based process.
A nurse of nearly thirty years on the grandmother who set her on the path, the vanishing art of bedside nursing, and why proper care can't be reduced to a checklist.
From airline maintenance to founder of Next Trial AI — on treating regulation as architecture, making trial start-up predictable, and why patients should see the whole picture before they consent.
Thirty years in biopharma and a committed patient advocate — on the grant that made him leave academia, decentralised trials arriving just before their time, and putting patients at the centre.
A MedTech regulatory strategist on how far medical-device regulation has come, why risk should drive the rules, and a cell biologist's mission to help the people who build things.
Clinical technology specialist at CRS Cube on what it actually takes to make trials simpler, why sites and sponsors keep talking past each other, and the patient stories that keep him honest.
Biotech transformation lead and host of Tech & Drugs on the post-ChatGPT rush of tech talent into pharma, treating drug development as engineering, and where AI goes beyond the chatbot.
A rare-disease clinical operations leader on patients who'd never met anyone else with their condition, why rare disease chose her, and the neuroscience that shaped how she leads.
Two decades building software for life sciences — on the entrepreneurial jump he didn't plan, the problem-solver's mindset, and keeping family in the frame.
CEO and co-founder of Delfa on a career at the seam of AI and life sciences, and building agents that automate clinical operations, starting with recruitment.
Pharmacist, founder and CEO of Maxwellia on widening access to medicines through reclassification, and raising serious money as a female founder on a mission.
Co-founder and COO of Navidence on turning real-world data into something the industry can actually trust, and the decentralised future he's been helping build.
Scientist, data strategist and founder of Navis Bio on bridging molecular biology and advanced analytics, and a cosmopolitan path from telecoms to biomedical innovation.
US Navy veteran, consultant and nonprofit leader on the discipline that transfers from service to strategy, and fractional expertise for organisations that can't otherwise afford it.
CEO and co-founder of FindMeCure and TrialHub on making trials accessible, transparent and patient-centric, and designing studies around the real world rather than the ideal one.
A clinical research leader on decentralised, patient-first platforms, and a mission that hasn't changed: restore trust, streamline operations, and make trials genuinely inclusive.
'Real World Wendy' on turning messy real-world data into evidence regulators will accept, and what a career across providers, payers and government reveals about the data ecosystem.
Men's mental-health coach and author of How to Help Him on the friend whose death upended the standard advice, and why 'just talk to someone' is only the start.
Co-founder of Docuply on modernising compliance for regulated industries without trading away security or speed, and a pre-validated eQMS built for teams who can least afford friction.
Founder and CEO of Eularis on two decades applying AI to pharma's hardest commercial problems, and why impact, not novelty, is the only metric that counts.
Founder of Intention Performance on alcohol-free living as a performance choice, the clarity that arrived after thirty days, and coaching men to the level they suspect is there.
Co-founder of Viedoc and prolific life-science angel investor on building an eClinical platform used in eighty countries, and backing people over demos.
Onco-genomics scientist turned founder of ClinicalNet on the recruitment bottleneck that delays most trials, and matching patients in minutes rather than months.
Mathematician, RBQM pioneer and CEO of Cyntegrity on modelling risk instead of chasing it, and training 1,500+ professionals to make trials safer and smarter.
International Operations Director at Pratia on leading pan-European trial operations while her homeland endures war, and keeping compassion at the centre of every decision.
Healthcare leader, investor and mentor on delivering complex care where people live, bringing a social conscience to strategy, and a whole career in one industry.
Founder and CEO of PRX Engage on the patient-retention problem that quietly wrecks trials, and building engagement that's ethical and human, not merely efficient.
CEO of Inventus on why the phones and tablets a trial runs on are a bigger headache than anyone admits, and building device provisioning that just works.
Board-certified internist and digital health educator on meeting people where they are, challenging inequities, and why 'main character energy' belongs in public health.
Founder of the CRO Caritas on building a company that advances medicine and looks after its people — and why treating wellbeing as performance infrastructure lifted retention by 30%.
Co-founder of the Copenhagen consultancy Trianon on two decades in eClinical, an engineering-physics mind applied to clinical systems, and getting the plumbing right.
Co-founder and CSO of Analysis Mode on bringing AI into bioprocess development, and why future-proofing biomanufacturing is a scientific necessity, not a nice-to-have.
Founder of Delve Health on decentralised trials built from personal experience, and a patient-first mission to make research accessible to everyone, everywhere.
Steward of the MMAS, the gold standard in medication-adherence measurement, on adherence as behaviour over time — the outcome hiding behind every other outcome.
A pharmacist born in Lebanon and now UK-based on evidence-based practice, multicultural insight, and stepping into clinical research at the start of a career worth watching.
Leader of the CRO Pharmaxi on running trials across Ukraine and Poland through profound adversity, building an in-house EDC, and creating a company people want to work for.
Founder of Study Connect on speeding up trials, the FDA breakthrough-designated cardiac device he helped bring to market, and turning bold ideas into patient impact.
Founder of Clinology on twenty-five years of operational depth, human-centred trial design, and understanding what a protocol actually asks of the people who run it.
Andy York — AI, Data Science & Why 80% Accuracy Isn't Good Enough
Today's guest is Andy York, one of the most respected voices in global statistical programming and clinical data science. Andy shares 30+ years of lessons — from paper CRFs to AI guardrails, the shift from SAS to R, and what the next generation of pharma programmers must learn to stay relevant.
Bilal Bham — Life Sciences Strategy, Human Perspective & Building Amodaia
Today's guest is Bilal Bham, founder and CEO of Amodaia, a senior-led life science consultancy supporting biotech, pharma, and medtech teams at critical decision points across regulatory affairs, medical affairs, market access, marketing communications, and fundraising. With nearly two decades in life sciences, Bilal brings both strategic clarity and a human perspective shaped by lived experience.
Steven Thompson — AI, Clinical Trial Activation & Why 85% of Trials Are Delayed
Today's guest is Steven Thompson, who spent more than two decades reshaping how clinical research actually gets done. He's the founder of Next trial AI and a leading voice at the intersection of AI trial activation and human-centered design in healthcare.
Scott Schliebner — DCTs, Patient-Centric Trials & 30 Years of Pharma Innovation
Today's guest is Scott Schliebner, who is a seasoned biopharma executive with nearly 30 years of experience spanning biotech, CROs and nonprofit life science organizations. He currently serves as CEO and founder of Ascent Biostrategies and previously has worked at Novatech and various other companies.
Thibault Geoui — AI, Drug Discovery What Next Generation of Scientists Must Learn
Today's guest is Thibault Geoui, dr. Tebo z, host of the acclaimed Tech and Drugs podcast, and a driving force at the intersection of biotech innovation and digital transformation. His podcast has become a go-to platform for unpacking the future of pharma, where Thibault brings a rare blend of scientific insight and startup savvy.
Poorya Amini — Protocol AI, 800k Clinical Trials & Why Pharma Does It Wrong
Today's guest is Poorya Amini, founder and CEO of Risklick A Swiss digital health company that's redefining how clinical trial protocols are designed Poorya's, journey spans veterinary medicine, a PhD in pharmacology. And hands-on experience managing trials at the University of Burn.
Matt Veatch — Real World Data, Phenotypes & Why Precision Beats Big Data
Today's guest is Matt Veatch, co-founder and COO of Navidence, and a driving force behind the Real World Wednesday's podcast, a weekly forum that's shaping how we think about real world data and real world evidence.
Dr. Andree Bates — Pharma AI, Saving Lives with Data, HelloFresh of Medicine
Today's guest is Dr Andree Bates, who is a pioneering force in pharmaceutical ai. She's known for transforming how life science companies harness data to drive growth, innovation, and patient outcomes. As founder and CEO of Eularis, Dr.
Sverre Bengtsson — Building Viedoc, Airport Deal & Why Europe Must Work Together
Today's guest is Sverre Bengtsson, who is a trailblazer in clinical trial innovation and digital transformation. As co-founder at Viedoc Technologies, he's helped shape one of the most widely adopted eClinical platforms in the world, streamlining trials across more than 80 countries, and empowering thousands of research teams to work smarter and faster.
Wessam Sonbol — Delve Health & Why Clinical Trials Failed His Mother
Today's guest is Wessam Sonbol, CEO of Delve Health, a pioneering force in digital health and decentralized trials. Leading a groundbreaking platform that supports clinical research in 65+ languages, Wessam is revolutionizing patient access to clinical trials through innovative integration of wearables, telehealth, and AI-powered solutions.
Anders Mortin — Triticon, Knowledge World & 25 Years of Accidental Pharma
Today's guest is Anders Mortin, who is a seasoned eClinical professional with over two decades of experience in clinical development processes and systems known for his strategic vision and leadership, Anders excels in managing cross-functional teams and driving innovative solutions.
Ashish Rishi — Inclusion Debt, Equity Engine & the Patients Trials Leave Out
Ashish Rishi — founder and CEO of Unwritten Health — joins Adam Walker to explain "inclusion debt": how bias compounds at every stage of drug development, from unmet need defined without the real patient voice, to multi-billion-pound programmes built on focus groups of eight to ten patient experts, to recruitment budgets thrown at social ads that only reach the already-reachable. Also in this episode: the two-minute conversation that told an 18-year-old his father had terminal prostate cancer, the Equity Engine panel of 6,500 UK participants profiled across the social determinants of health, AI analysis that tears apart a tone-deaf recruitment flyer, UK health data fragmentation, and what a neurodivergent-friendly clinical research unit would actually look like.
Louise Callin — Dementia, Photos Sparking Conversation & Making Care More Human
Louise Callin — founder and CEO of ReelLife Conversations — joins Adam Walker to explain how a photograph can become a conversation rather than a memory test. After nearly 30 years leading technology and transformation in global corporations, Louise left to build a social care technology platform inspired by her mum's dementia journey: photos grouped by face and place, AI-generated conversation prompts, and linked images that keep a conversation flowing. Also in this episode: accessible design for dementia, why 'I remember when' beats 'do you remember', the disproportionate caregiving load carried by women, and taking a values-driven business through venture capital investment.
Jura Lasas — Rare Disease, Patient Advocacy & a One-Way Ticket to America
Today's guest is Jurate Lasiene, who is a clinical research leader and biotech consultant specializing in rare disease clinical operations for small biopharma and biotech companies with over 20 years bridging academia and industry. She's become the operational compass for biotech's, navigating early clinical trials.
Tom Farrand — AI Agents, Patient Recruitment Building Delfa from Cockroach Hotel
Today's guest is Tom Farrand, who has worked throughout his career at the intersection of AI and life sciences. First at IBM, helping university hospitals to use supercomputers to model 3D hot scans. Then joining leading startups.
Maya Zlatanova — Designing Trials for Real Patients (Not Unicorns)
Today's guest is Maya Zlatanova, a visionary leader in clinical research and host of the podcast trials with Myers Z, where she explores the future of trials with global experts and patient advocates as CEO and Co-founder of Find Me Cure and Trial Hub, Maya is on a mission to make clinical trials more accessible, transparent, and patient-centric.
Nuria Coll Bastus — Trial Matching in 5 Minutes & Why 80% of Trials Are Delayed
Today's guest is Nuria Coll Bastus, who is an industry disruptor whose roots in academic research and onco genomics have blossomed into a bold new vision for clinical trials. Born in Spain and now based in the uk. Noria brings a cross-cultural lens to one of farmer's most persistent challenges.
Keith Berelowitz — PRxEngage, 35k Users in Month 1 & Why Patients Need North Star
Today's guest is Keith Berelowitz, who is the founder and CEO of PRX engage a platform designed to revolutionize how we engage and retain patients in clinical trials with over 20 years of experience in pharma and biotech research.
Dr. Berry Pierre — Main Character Energy, 2k YouTube Vids & Trust in Healthcare
Today's guest is Dr. Berry Pierre, a board-certified internist, national speaker, and host of the Lunch and Learn podcast. With over 15 years of clinical experience, he's treated patients across hospitals, rehab centers, and nursing homes, tackling everything from infectious diseases to chronic conditions.
Lisa Kerr — Patient Engagement, Lived Experience & Why 95% of Eligible Patients Never Join a Trial
Lisa Kerr — Head of Patient Engagement at Evinova, AstraZeneca's health tech business — joins Adam Walker for one of the most honest conversations on the Pharma Prescribed Podcast. A PhD chemist who climbed to global project director, hit the cliff edge, and came back with a mission: divorce, clinical depression, three months as an outpatient at the Priory, founding AstraZeneca's Safe Space ERG, building mental health navigation tools that scaled globally — and why only 5–7% of eligible patients ever join a clinical trial.
Dr Pat Boulogne — Functional Medicine, Fasting Since 17 on Zero Medications @71
Dr Pat Boulogne — performance optimisation strategist, functional medicine expert and bestselling author — joins Adam Walker for one of the most practical wellbeing conversations on Pharma Prescribed. At 71, on zero medications, Pat shares 30+ years of root-cause medicine: intermittent fasting since age 17, food pairing and the alkaline tide, the three brains, affirmations with a why, dairy and microbiome, and the organic broccoli story.
Dermot Whelan — Burnout, Anxiety & the Science of Mindfulness
Broadcaster, comedian, best-selling author and meditation teacher Dermot Whelan joins Adam Walker to talk about reframing stress, navigating anxiety and panic attacks, escaping the busyness badge of honour, and the simple tools — from box breathing to checking in with your heart — that turn the stress response into a superpower.
Amelia Wrighton — Suicide Loss, Grief & the Charity That Helped Adam's Family
Today's guest is Amelia Wrighton, who is the co-founder and CEO of the charity, suicide and Co. Her commitment to suicide bereavement is rooted in her lived experience and is a powerful thread running through her work and her leadership.
Sam Usher — Sauna, Reinvention & Building Steam Works from a Beach in Devon
Today's guest is Sam Usher, his career began by accident, a place at the National Youth Theater, sparking a fascination with performance that quickly evolved into choreography, the power of expression through the body.
Ryan Parke — Testosterone, Suicide & Why Doing Everything Still Wasn't Enough
Today's guest is Ryan Parke, who is a 10 x speaker, award-winning coach and a leading voice in men's mental health. He's the author of the book, how to Help Him, the Book for Women, worried About a Man After Losing a Close Friend to Suicide in 2019.
Paul McCormack — Sobriety, Untapped Performance & Why Alcohol Steals Your Best
Today's guest is Paul McCormack, who is the founder of Intention Performance. His journey from alcohol routines to intentional alcohol-free living has sparked a movement in personal transformation. After just 30 days without alcohol, Paul experienced such a profound shift in clarity, energy, and purpose that he never looked back.
Graham Allcott — Kind, Psychological Safety & the Quiet Power of Kindness at Work
Graham Allcott — bestselling author of How to Be a Productivity Ninja and Kind: The Quiet Power of Kindness at Work — joins Adam Walker to dismantle the ruthless-boss archetype. Kindness builds trust, trust builds psychological safety, and psychologically safe teams outperform everyone else. Along the way: Timpson and family businesses, why charities aren't always the kindest places to work, the kindness window that closes as you notice it, slowness as savouring, and how Seth Godin came to blurb the book.
Nives Rombini — AI, Drug Discovery & Building a Profitable Start-up
Today's guest is Nives Rombini, who is a scientist, data strategist and founder whose career bridges molecular biology, immunology, and advanced analytics. Nives leads Navis Bio, a venture dedicated to harnessing data-driven insights for biomedical innovation.
Alan Salter — Military Service, Servant Leadership & Brilliance at the Basics
Today's guest is Alan Salter, who is a professional whose career spans military service, international business and healthcare leadership. A proud US Navy veteran. Alan served with distinction before transitioning into the private sector where he established a management consulting company.
Dr. Daniel Fox — Research Deserts & Building CRPN to Fix Clinical Trial Access
Today's guest is Dr. Daniel Fox, who is the CEO of CRPN Central, and a leader in redefining clinical research through decentralized patient first platforms. With a background in medicine policy and digital innovation, Dr. Fox is building scalable ecosystems that restore trust and transparency in trials.
Natalie Douglas — Building Companies, Leading & Why Mentorship Changed Everything
Today's guest is Natalie Douglas, who is a transformative leader who's influenced, spans global pharma, biotech, and health tech. With over 20 years of board level experience, Natalie has held various CEO roles, including at healthcare at home, and led strategic growth at Idis, which is now Cgen.
Charlotte Chadwick — Clinology, 25 Years in Clinical & Consultant Visibility
Today's guest is Charlotte Chadwick, founder of Clinology, a consultancy helping pharma rethink trials through the lens of operational depth and human centered design. Charlotte brings over 25 years of experience in clinical research spanning senior roles across CROs, sponsors, and consultancies.
Yuriy Lebid — Building a CRO in Ukraine, Wartime Resilience & Never Giving Up
Yuriy Lebid — CEO of Ukrainian CRO Pharmaxi — joins Adam Walker to tell the story of leading a clinical research company through the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. From evacuating Kyiv on 24 February 2022 to promising salaries in full for six months, restarting trials with better enrollment than before the war, expanding into Poland, and rebuilding for growth, Yuriy shares hard-won lessons on resilience, honesty in hiring, and why passion — not calculation — is the only durable foundation for a career.
Andreas Beust — How a Small CRO Covers the Globe Without Growing
Andreas Beust — CEO and Managing Director of GCP Service International in Bremen and President of ACROS, the Association of International CROs — joins Adam Walker to explain how a small CRO can run trials globally without ballooning in size. Ten similarly sized, like-minded CROs across the US, Europe, the Middle East, India, China and Australia agree that once a partner joins, their country is off-limits to the others: grow together, not bigger. Also in this episode: from the biostatistics desk to the CEO's office, hiring for attitude, leading without ego, a frank reality check on AI in clinical trials, and why discomfort is what actually drives growth.
Alen Hadzic — founder and CEO of Clinical Trial Scan and creator of Dyno AI — joins Adam Walker for a masterclass in patient recruitment as an engineered system. Former Olympic fencer, ex-affiliate advertiser with $5–7M of clinical trial ad data behind him, Alen breaks down his seven-step enrollment funnel, why hot leads beat cold databases, how his Medellín call team converts in the evening blocks the industry sleeps through, and the patent-pending cost-per-enrollment model behind it all.
Adam Baumgart — RBQM, AI in Clinical Trials & 38 Years of Hard-Won Pharma Wisdom
Today's guest is Adam Baumgart, an advisor and consultant at ZS Associates and Alcedo Consulting whose passion is enhancing risk-based quality management and clinical trial processes. Drawing on 35 years of CRO and pharma experience, including leadership roles at AstraZeneca and Covance, Adam provides strategic input on AI models to optimize RBQM, clinical data review, and site monitoring.
Sylvain Berthelot — Patient-Centricity, Korean Innovation & Simplifying Trials
Today's guest is Sylvain Berthelot, who is a clinical technology and life science professional with deep expertise in clinical systems and the digital ecosystem that supports modern clinical research.
Wendy Turenne — Real World Evidence, Messy Data & Why AI Must Earn Your Trust
Today's guest is Wendy Turenne, widely known in the industry as Real World Wendy. A strategic force in real world data and evidence generation, she most recently served as Chief Data Officer and SVP of Evidence Solutions at Aeon, where she led global teams in transforming real world data into regulatory-grade evidence.
Jan Krikava — Docuply, Affordable QMS & Why Small Pharma Deserves Better Tools
Today's guest is Jan Krikava, co-founder and managing director of Docu Ply, a document automation platform purpose built for the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors with a degree in software engineering and a background in enterprise.
Artem Adrianov — RBQM, Fraud Detection & Young CEO Program Outperforming MBAs
Today's guest is Artem Adrianov, mathematician strategist, Risk-Based Quality Management, trailblazer as co-founder and CEO of Integrity. He spent over 25 years transforming clinical trials through data intelligence and risk-based methodologies.
Dr. Anna Titkova — Building Clinical Trials in Ukraine War, COVID & Restarting
Today's guest is Anna Titkova, who is the International Operations Director and Country head of Pratia Ukraine, one of Europe's largest site networks, where she oversees operations across multiple countries with a focus on accessibility, innovation, and quality.
Helene Quie — MedTech Regulation, Danish Innovation & Getting Devices to Patients
Today's guest is Helene Quie, who is a strategic decision maker, founder and CEO of qm, med Consulting, a global healthcare consultancy, CRO, driving medical device innovation with more than 25 years at the intersection of science regulation and commercial strategy.
Duncan Kemp — Redundancy, Reinvention & 20 Years of Clinical Software
Today's guest is Duncan Kemp, who is the founder of Software Solutions, a software consultancy firm with a mission to empower life science businesses with innovative and reliable solutions that drive efficiency, enhanced productivity, and foster growth.
Anna Maxwell — Drug Reclassification, Women's Health & OTC Contraceptive Pill
Today's guest is Anna Maxwell, who is a mission-driven founder, pharmacist, and entrepreneur dedicated to widening access to medicines and empowering people to take more control of their health. She's the CEO and founder of Maxwellia, one of the UK's most ambitious, emerging consumer healthcare companies.
Steve Sanghera — Inventus, Purpose-Built Devices & an Obsession Over Rivets
Today's guest is Steve Sanghera, who is the CEO of Inventus, a UK based innovator redefining how clinical trials are powered through secure provisioned mobile devices. With a background steeped in digital transformation, Steve leads Inventus in delivering smartphones and tablets.
Today's guest is Leigh Fell, who is a trailblazer in clinical research, a champion of corporate wellbeing and the visionary founder of Caritas. Leigh's journey from managing oncology trials to building a purpose-driven CRO is a masterclass in blending scientific vigor.
Belma Alispahic — SimCell, Digital Twins & Why AI Isn't Optional Anymore
Today's guest is Belma Alispahic, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Analysis Mode. With a master's in applied biotechnology from UPS University, she has a track record of turning complexity into clarity and is reshaping how we think about bioprocess development.
Matthew Mace — Study Connect, Why Pharma Needs MedTech Outsiders in Cardiology
Today's guest is Matthew Mace, who is redefining what leadership looks like at the cutting edge of clinical research on multiple fronts. Founder of Study Connect, Inc. Where he's on a mission to streamline scientific innovation through faster trials and smarter collaboration.
Host Adam Walker meets his namesake — Qualified Person, NHS pharmacist and Head of Development & Innovation at the North East and North Cumbria Medicines Manufacturing Centre. They cover Specials manufacturing, the new aseptic pathfinder hub gearing up for 150,000 chemotherapy and 750,000 IV antibiotic doses a year, the door-to-needle sepsis window, the personal loss driving the mission, and the Help Me GMP platform training the next generation.
Today's guest is Sharmila Hume, a practitioner who's built her career around helping high performers whose bodies are no longer supporting them, and who are running out of answers.
Helen Palk — 30 Years of NHS Nursing, COVID Vaccines & Human Side of Healthcare
Today's guest is Helen Palk, shaped long before she ever stepped onto ward. Inspired by her grandmother, an army nurse caring for injured troops. During the Second World War. Helen grew up surrounded by strong, compassionate women in healthcare.
Today's guest is Charbel Abdo, born and raised in Lebanon. Charbel brings deep rooted expertise and a global perspective to the future of pharmaceutical care, a fully qualified pharmacist. He built his clinical foundation in Lebanon and recently earned an MSC in pharmaceutical sciences with distinction at the University of Greenwich.
Philip Morisky — Medication Adherence & Why Healthcare's Metrics Must Be Fixed
Today's guest is Philip Morisky, who serves as Chief Optimist at Adherence, leading the company's mission to revolutionize global medication adherence.