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Tech Tonics — Health & Fitness
Tech Tonics

Tech Tonics, the Podcast, is a twice-monthly program focused on the people and passion at the intersection of technology and health. Hosted by Lisa Suennen and David Shaywitz (the co-authors of “Tech Tonics: Can Passionate Entrepreneurs Heal Healthcare With Technology?”) the show draws on their experience in business, medicine, and health-IT.

The Tech Tonics podcast seeks to bring the people in the digital health field to life and, ideally, elevate humanism in a healthcare world captivated by technology. “We deeply believe in what Robert Coles, an inspiration to us both, has termed ‘the call of stories,’” David Shaywitz says. “Our aspiration is to bring the spirit of Coles and Michael Lewis to the world of digital health.”

Together, Suennen and Shaywitz engage a range of intriguing guests in discussions that enable listeners to appreciate the stories behind the startups and the people behind the passion.

Lisa Suennen is the Managing Partner of Venture Valkyrie Consulting, LLC, a firm that provides advisory services to corporate and independent venture capital funds and to large and small companies around investment and product strategy, innovation spin-outs, market development, partnerships and financing. She is currently a member of the Qualcomm Life Advisory Board, the Sanofi Integrated Care Advisory Board, the Dignity Health Foundation Board, and an Advisor to the California Health Care Foundation Innovation Fund and a member of several private company Boards of Directors.

Dr. David Shaywitz is the Chief Medical Officer of DNAnexus, a company that makes it easier to work with genomic data using advanced bioinformatics and scalable compute systems based on the cloud. He received his M.D. from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health, Science, and Technology at Harvard Medical School, and his Ph.D. from the Department of Biology at MIT. He trained in internal medicine and endocrinology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and conducted his post-doctoral research in Doug Melton’s lab at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

Tech Tonics, the Podcast is produced by Jason Lopez and syndicated by Connected Social Media. You can also find out more at venturevalkyrie.com and connectedsocialmedia.com.

Copyright: © ConnectedSocialMedia.com

Latest Episodes:

Tech Tonics: Shami Feinglass – Doctor, Policy-Maker, BMX rider Nov 20, 2019

Show notes

Shamiram “Shami” Feinglass, MD, MPH, should have been a born again flower child. She spent her childhood among the San Francisco royalty that defined the 60’s and 70’s rock and roll culture here in the City by the Bay. Her single mom raised her while helping found the legendary Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, which was Shami’s first exposure to medicine. One of her mom’s best friend was the legendary concert promoter Bill Graham and she grew up thinking nothing of hanging out at Santana’s birthday party or having Passover at Delancey Street or celebrating at Glide Memorial Church.

But Shami didn’t end up as a perennial Berkeley protestor in Birkenstocks – she had higher aspirations to be a ballerina or a doctor. In a way she got both – she is doctor by day and dances for fun. She is also currently Global Head of Medical and Government Affairs at Danaher Corp., one one of the nation’s biggest companies you never heard of. Danaher is ranked 160^th on the Fortune 500 and has over $19 billion in revenue. Shami is a key leader in the company’s extensive diagnostics and life sciences businesses. Oh, and by the way, she also happens to be a nationally and internationally ranked BMX bike racer, holding a Maryland BMX State Championship spot and an active member of the USA BMX World Championship Team.

At this point you should realize: Shami does nothing halfway.

Shami’s path from backstage groupie to front stage leader took a path through medicine and particularly through the world of government and public policy. She helped Rosalyn Carter think through mental health policy during her own studies at Emory and was a Commander in the US Public Health Service. She was later a Senior Medical Officer at CMS, working with fellow Tech Tonics podcast guest Tanisha Carino, where she helped drive adoption and implementation of the newly rising concept of evidence-based policy. All this while raising a family of two kids, completing two medical residencies, being named a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, and serving as a mentor to women in the medical and life sciences fields.

For the record, Shami, like Lisa, is an Aspen Institute Health Innovation Fellow and both attended the same 1983 Day on the Green concert, though they did not yet know they were bound to be friends.

Shami’s godfather, legendary Bay Area chef Narsai David, was the one who gave her the name Shamiram, not one that is easily found on bike license plates. Legend has it that Shamiram was an Assyrian Queen who actually invented the library, even though a man, Hannibal, later got credit for it. Shami has taken that inequity to heart and wholeheartedly committed to ensuring gender equality and equity in the workplace. She prides herself on being someone who loves to dive into things that scare her, though it’s hard to imagine what might make that list.

Tech Tonics: Sam Brasch, A Modern Day Alex P. Keaton at Work Nov 04, 2019

Show notes

Born and bred in Mill Valley, California, where we record our podcast, Sam Brasch saw himself as a modern-day Alex P. Keaton – he just wanted to be a business man. He was “that kid” who was reading the Lee Iacocca biography in 4th grade while the other kids played soccer and kickball. Sam got his wish and is today Senior Managing Director of Kaiser Ventures, the corporate venture fund that helps drive innovation for Kaiser Permanente.

In today’s show, Alex, er Sam talks about how the Bay Area changed over his life time and what motivated him to shun his alternative plan to be a Supreme Court Justice or a Senator.

In fact, Sam almost diverted to medical school after his own medical crisis: a serious head injury. Instead of taking that path, he joined a consulting firm and focused on healthcare. As he thought about dream jobs, he considered how to meld his business ambitions with the field of health, first considering leadership at a healthcare system. Sam heard the siren song of eHealth and joined a startup called Medicopia (later named Vitals), his first exposure to entrepreneurship and to the pleasing notion that there didn’t have to be rules about how to solve a problem.

Sam took a tour through Medtronic, then the Wharton Business School seeking his destiny. That destiny arrived on his door in the form of Frazier Ventures, a health care venture firm that “seemed sexy.” Venture clearly still has it, at least in Sam’s eyes, as he has been a venture investor ever since 2005, working in both independent venture funds and corporate funds, including the Kaiser Ventures fund that he now leads.

We are delighted to welcome Sam to Tech Tonics.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s show—Manatt Health is a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that integrates a full service law firm with a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help our clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Tech Tonics: Kari Nadeau, Where Curiosity Meets Compassion Oct 21, 2019

Show notes

Stanford professor Kari Nadeau lives the life, some would say the dream, of what Judah Folkman has called the inquisitive physician, integrating her deep knowledge of chemistry, her experience in biotech drug development, and her clinical acumen and deeply-felt compassion for patients to bring the best of medicine and science to children and adults with food allergies.

Kari was born in New Hampshire and raised in New Jersey, at least in part on a houseboat, as her dad worked for the EPA. An inspirational chemistry teacher in high school motivated her interest in this discipline. After majoring in biology at Haverford, she returned to chemistry for the research component of her MD/PhD training, conducting her graduate work in the laboratory of distinguished Harvard chemist Chris Walsh (whose daughter, Allison, a brilliant oncologist at Stanford, we recently featured on Tech Tonics, here). Kari describes Chris as a remarkable mentor, keenly interested in translating science into application, and in appropriately collaborating with industry to achieve this goal.

After initially intending to train in pediatric oncology, Kari found herself drawn to clinical and translational research at Biogen in Boston. A sick relative on her husband’s side prompted the family to move to the Bay Area to be closer to them and further prompted Kari to realize she missed clinical medicine. After retraining as an allergist and immunologist, she continued pursuing translational work at Stanford, where she’s now a global leader in the study of food allergies.

We had a fantastically inspiring conversation, and are so glad she was able to join us on the show!

Tech Tonics is sponsored by Manatt Health, a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that includes a full service law firm and a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Show notes:

David’s Forbes piece on Range, the captivating book he was gushing about at the top of the show (here).

New York Times profile of Kari (“The Allergy Buster”) (here).

Website for the Sean N Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford, which Kari directs.

Recent FDA recommendation to approve the first medicine to ameliorate a food allergy (peanut) – discussed in this NPR piece.

Tech Tonics: David Altshuler, Physician-Scientist In Pursuit Of The New Oct 07, 2019

Show notes

David Altshuler was living the academic dream as professor and human geneticist at Harvard and MIT, where he was co-founder and Deputy Director of the Broad Institute. Yet in December 2014, he left this life to join Vertex, in continued pursuit of his translational vision.

Born in upstate New York, David moved to the Boston area when he was a toddler and hasn’t looked back (nor beyond the 617). The son of a professor and an educator, David was inherently scholarly, attending MIT where he first experienced research in the lab of gene therapy pioneer Richard Mulligan, on the legendary third floor of the Whitehead Institute.

David saw enough of research to convince himself he wanted to pursue clinical medicine, and then, while in medical school at Harvard, he saw enough to convince himself he wanted to pursue biomedical research as well, so he pursued a joint MD/PhD. His PhD research resulted in what he describes as an exciting scientific result that didn’t fit neatly in an established framework, so it received scant attention – an observation that led to a fascinating conversation about incremental vs disruptive research on the podcast, and inspired this blog post from Lisa.

Ultimately, David found his passion and his calling in human genetics, working initially for and then subsequently in partnership with legendary scientist Eric Lander, with whom David helped co-found the transformational Broad Institute, and served as Deputy Director. Interestingly this decision in the mid 1990’s to work on the human genetics of polygenic, common diseases (vs monogenic, rare diseases, say) was viewed by many well-intended mentors as committing “career suicide.” Good thing he persisted.

More recently, David made another brave decision, leaving a comfortable and distinguished academic career to become a senior pharma R&D executive, serving as Executive VP of R&D at Vertex. We are so thrilled not only that David joined us on today’s show, but that he was so generous about sharing the complexities and uncertainties of his journey, and the key choices along the way. We’re sure you will be captivated as well!

This podcast is sponsored by Manatt Health—a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that includes a full service law firm and a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help our clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Podcast Notes:

The captivating book about the scientific process David references is Discovering, by Robert Root-Bernstein, available from Amazon here.

Luke Timmerman “Long Run” interview with Janelle Anderson, discussed on podcast, here.

David’s Forbes piece on cell engineering, focusing on company Janelle helped found; here.

Tech Tonics: Tanisha Carino Sep 23, 2019

Show notes

Tanisha Carino’s family fled from the Ferdinand Marcos regime in the Phillipines and settled in what she still believes to be the sweetest of homes: Alabama. As she travelled through young adulthood she had her first awareness that many Americans live on the fringe, desperately needing both healthcare and social services. Since then Tanisha has spent her career in healthcare seeking to strike the perfect balance between being an expert and being a leader. In so doing, she is always looking for new ways to balance the concepts of cost and caring for the most vulnerable to best define the true essence of rational decision-making in our healthcare system.

Tanisha’s career has been guided by her family’s commitment to sacrifice and helping others, always asking herself, “what can I do that might be different and helpful to others?” From her first interaction with the healthcare system, as an intern at AID Atlanta through her roles in healthcare consulting at Avalere, pharma operations at GlaxoSmithKline and now at FasterCures she is ever on the hunt for ways to bring pragmatism and emphathy to her work. A constant theme through Tanisha’s journey has been how to align payment with value, recognizing that what we decide to value through reimbursement policy directly drives the research and development pathways of the future.

In her current role, Tanisha focuses on creative partnership models between industry, government and academia with a goal to optimize the implementation of the 21st Century Cures Act and on models of venture philanthropy that will speed new cures to patients, – particularly new therapeutics for rare diseases that industry elects not to develop because they lack of a large target market.She’s also known to try a little karaoke now and then, favoring Madonna’s Dress Me Up when it’s her turn to sing. We asked Tanisha what the healthcare systems’ karoke song would be; her response: Winner Takes it All. At least for now.
We are delighted to welcome our friend Tanisha to Tech Tonics!

We are grateful to our sponsor, Manatt Health. Manatt Health is a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that integrates a full service law firm with a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help our clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Tech Tonics: Glenn Pierce, All In Sep 09, 2019

Show notes

Physician, scientist, patient, advocate: Glenn Pierce inhabits all four roles, and seems the physical embodiment of the translational impulse, driven by his own experiences coping with severe hemophilia to advance the science – and the policy – he hopes will eventually cure this condition for patients across the globe.

While other kids enjoyed carefree childhoods, Glenn spent much of his early years in the hospital, recovering from bleeding episodes associated with the hemophilia A with which he was born. From this experience was born a passion to cure hemophilia, a commitment he memorialized in writing when he was ten, during one of the many hospital stays.

Glenn, a native of Cleveland, attended college at Case Western, and stayed at Case for his MD/PhD, then went to Washington University in St. Louis for additional training in laboratory medicine and hematology, though he explicitly steered clear of hemophilia professionally, thinking at the time this might be uncomfortably close to home; on the side, however, he volunteered for hemophilia organizations, and became increasingly involved with the community.

After a series of industry roles with increasing responsibility, Glenn decided he wanted to unite his personal and professional passions, and started to work at the interface, leveraging his deep personal commitment and an increasingly large team of experts; in a sense, he became a hemophilia entrepreneur, working with his selected colleagues to drive the science forward in a range of companies that would include Bayer and Biogen.

Today, Glenn drives innovation as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Third Rock Ventures, where he’s foundationally involved with companies such as the liver-focused Ambys Medicines (note: David’s firm, TVI, is an investor). He is also actively involved with the World Federation of Hemophilia, as he seeks to improve the lives of patients with hemophilia around the globe.

We are delighted to welcome Glenn to Tech Tonics!

Today’s episode is sponsored by Manatt Health—a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that integrates a full service law firm and a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help its clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Tech Tonics: Navigating the Healthcare Highway with Megan Callahan, Lyft’s Head of Healthcare Aug 19, 2019

Show notes

When Megan Callahan was growing up, she was supposed to end up in healthcare – she didn’t even know there were alternatives. And she has spent her career and life in and around the field in more ways than she ever expected, as both an executive and a breast cancer patient. What she didn’t foresee was that she would be putting her healthcare skills and experiences to work at a ride-sharing company, driving their navigation of the healthcare highway.

Veering off her original plan to become a physician, Megan got an Masters in Public Health and headed into epidemiology, looking at underserved populations devastated by cancer in the strip-mining town of Pueblo, CO. But seeing that her ability to make a meaningful impact was limited, she headed down a different, more business-oriented path, first at firms like Anderson Consulting and HealthNet, but later finding her way into a pod of people that traveled from startup to startup together. Along the way she learned some great lessons about entrepreneurship but some tough ones about trust, governance, and the pitfalls of poor leadership.

Eventually Megan joined McKesson, working in the health solutions business in strategy and M&A. But in 2014 she learned she had Stage 3b breast cancer and got a front row seat in patient experience, dropping everything to recover and spend as much time as she could with her two young daughters. Fortunately, the story ended well, and McKesson was especially supportive, bringing Megan back after her recovery to design the strategy that led to the formation of Change Healthcare. In effect this was a return to the startup days, albeit one built by transferring assets from a large company and merging them with a small one. Megan stayed through formation of the company, wanting to “land the Change plane” because of a loyalty to her long-time team. She left in 2018 looking for a new adventure. Change Healthcare went public in 2019.

Lyft called Megan out of the blue while she was taking a sabbatical; the company could not have known that Megan’s own cancer experience painfully highlighted the importance of transportation support in healthcare. Megan jumped at the opportunity to combine her own experiences as a patient with her commitment to serving those in need. Moving from traditional healthcare players to Lyft has been characterized by an interesting revelation that being the healthcare voice in a non-healthcare company forces one to leave the jargon behind and frees one to think creatively in ways our traditional system sometime forgets to do.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Manatt Health—a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that integrates a full service law firm and a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help its clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Tech Tonics: Chris Gibson, Free Range Innovator Aug 05, 2019

Show notes

With confidence he attributes to his free-range childhood, Chris Gibson has followed his instincts and his heart, stepping away from the MD/PhD program in which he’s enrolled to co-found and lead Recursion Pharmaceuticals, one of the buzziest companies bringing AI to drug development. In mid-July, Recursion closed a $121M Series C, bringing their valuation ever closer to unicorn status.

Chris grew up in Portland, the son of a tech entrepreneur and an artist, and as a child was permitted a degree of independence that seems vanishingly rare. He went to college at Rice, pursuing both bioengineering and business management. At Rice, he also met his future wife, who then attended medical school in San Antonio; Chris followed, initially pursuing a PhD in tissue engineering, then joining the MD/PhD program. His wife then elected to continue her training in neurogenetics in Salt Lake City; Chris soon joined her in Utah, talking his way into the MD/PhD program at the University of Utah, and joining the lab of noted physician-scientist Dean Li.

Ultimately, it was in thinking through a failed experiment that he and Li came up with the idea for Recursion Pharma, a company that starts with the premise that biology is “massively complex.” They realized that in order to have a chance to understand biology at the level needed for most novel therapeutic interventions, you need to operate at a very large scale and remove human bias to the extent possible, generating highly reproducible data through the aggressive use of automation and imaging, analyzed through the lens of machine learning.

Founded in 2013, Recursion has not only raised significant capital, but it has also attracted a cadre of talented drug developers and sophisticated technologists. The company, based in Salt Lake City, now has over 150 employees, and continues to grow rapidly. In today’s show, Chris describes his vision for the company, but also his anxieties as a founder boldly pushing forward into largely uncharted waters.

We are delighted to welcome Chris to Tech Tonics!

Today’s episode is sponsored by Manatt Health—a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that integrates a full service law firm and a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help its clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Tech Tonics: Sumit Nagpal, At the Crossroads of Tech and Healthcare Jul 22, 2019

Show notes

Sumit Nagpal was born to a pair of healthcare entrepreneurs and raised in Kashmir, India. When he was 13, he came to the United States where he saw diversity for the first time. Sumit followed his parents into the Ivy League, starting at Brown, but left to follow his muse, Steve Jobs, at NeXT, where he worked side by side with Jobs for over two years. He continues to look at technology as a key driver of innovation, this time in healthcare, now from his recently accepted role as SVP and General Manager of Health Innovation for Comcast.

Sumit has been a serial entrepreneur between these two tech company gigs, starting The Method Factory, WellLogic, LumiraDx and two other enterprises, still in stealth. If Sumit has learned one thing during his entrepreneurial trek, it is this: Follow the Money. As he says, “Improvements won’t occur just because it’s the right thing to do.”

An impassioned golfer, Sumit says there are many lessons for entrepreneurs in the game, “One has to take lots of swings to get a tiny focused ball to a remote target. Focus, clarity of mind, practice and persistence are everything.”

We are grateful to Manatt Health for its sponsorship of Tech Tonics—Manatt Health is a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that integrates a full service law firm with a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help our clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Tech Tonics: Imran Haque, Grounded Data Scientist Jul 08, 2019

Show notes

A computational biologist by training, Imran Haque has managed to achieve the near-impossible: embracing the promise of data science in medicine while retaining his critical faculties. He may well be just the sort of innovator required at the intersection of medicine and big data.

Born and raised in the Bay Area, Imran says he grew up in the sort of environment where his father, an electrical engineer, didn’t think twice, when Imran was in elementary school, about giving him a book about how to code – which he immediately devoured.

Imran went to college at Berkeley (go Bears!), where he majored in electrical engineering and computer science, and developed an interest in computational biology. He pursued this in graduate school in computer science at Stanford, where he was advised by such luminaries as computational biologist Vijay Pande (now a VC) and AI wizard Daphne Koller (a previous Tech Tonics guest, and the founder of insitro).

Imran subsequently has forged the path at the intersection of biology and analytics, assuming roles of increasing prominence at Counsyl (focused on carrier screening) and Freenome (early identification of cancer). In these roles he developed a reputation for rigorous and critical thinking, arguing that data suggest screening couples for many rare diseases represents a sensible idea, while screening healthy people for very early stage cancers by looking for circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) may run up against physical limitations, namely the lack of a single disease molecule in the typical volume of blood sampled.

In addition, as David has written in Forbes (see here, also here), Imran is excited about the opportunities associated with data and analytics in biology, but is wary about the seductive false positives powerful techniques tend to generate.

Join us today for a captivating conversation from the untamed frontier of analytics in medicine and drug discovery.

Today’s show is sponsored by IDEA pharma, the industry’s leading path-to-market strategy practice, bringing more great medicines to patients. You can find them at:
ideapharma.com.

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