First in Human

Patients with implantable cardiac defibrillators live with a brutal tradeoff: the device that saves their life can also shock them without warning — so hard they describe it as getting kicked by a horse. Many develop PTSD, anxiety, or depression. And until now, there's been no alternative. Allison Post is CEO of Rhythio Medical and a cardiovascular biomaterials engineer who spent years running the innovation program at the Texas Heart Institute. Her team has developed a conductive hydrogel that's injected into the veins of the heart, where it solidifies into a network that can reset cardiac rhythm at a fraction of a percent of the energy of a traditional shock. The FDA granted breakthrough designation on preclinical data alone. In this episode, Allison walks us through the science behind the gel, what it was like to prove out an idea that sounded impossible, and the moment in the OR that changed everything. We talk about the patient experience that drives this work, the Houston ecosystem that made it possible, and why she left a job she loved to lead this company herself. If you care about the future of cardiac care, this one's for you. Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Visit Rhythio online: https://www.rhythiomedicaltech.com/Connect with Allison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allison-d-post-10103/

If a foot wound isn't healing, the clock is already ticking. Every day in the United States alone, 500 people lose a limb to peripheral vascular disease - and 40% of them were never even diagnosed before the amputation. Jill Somerset spent over 20 years as a vascular ultrasound tech before a moment of curiosity altered the arc of her career: she put a probe on her own foot and what she discovered led to inventing a metric - Pedal Acceleration Time - that could objectively measure blood flow in ways the standard tests simply couldn't. Today, that discovery now has over 30 peer-reviewed papers behind it and a global following. But... there was a problem: to use it, you basically had to be Jill. Enter Abu Khalifa, an ICU doctor who kept seeing these patients arrive too late, and Adam Gold, a veteran medtech engineer already well into his third career life. Together, the three of them founded Moonrise Medical to automate Jill's expertise into a device anyone can use - with FDA clearance and commercialization on the horizon this year. This episode is a conversation about curiosity, complementary obsessions, and what happens when three people from completely different worlds find the same unmet need.Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Visit Moonrise Medical online: https://moonrisemedical.com/Connect with Jill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jill-sommerset-rvt-fsvu-68110010/Connect with Adam on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-gold-4b2394/Connect with Abu on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abubaker-khalifa-87171a107/

In fifth grade, while other kids were drawing cars and airplanes, Andrew Ibrahim was flipping over his homework to sketch cities - mapping where the hospital should go, how far the school should be from the park, and deciding whether anyone would want to walk past a police station to get there. That obsession with putting pieces in the right place has shaped every chapter of his career since. Today, Andrew is a general surgeon and Chief Clinical Officer at Viz.ai, where he's helping build AI that works like the best chief resident you've ever had: flagging critical findings, cutting stroke treatment times by nearly an hour across 2,000 hospitals, and freeing doctors from the endless clicks and workarounds that drain their days. But Andrew's path was anything but direct. He got here by way of architecture school in London, inventing the visual abstract, becoming a tenured professor with 200 papers and NIH funding - and eventually, deciding all of that still wasn't enough to move the needle. We talk about why he left, what it was like testifying before Congress two weeks into his new job, and why he believes healthcare's biggest untapped resource isn't a technology — it's the people already in it. Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewibrahim/ Visit Andrew's Website: https://www.surgeryredesign.com/ Visit Viz.AI's website: https://www.viz.ai/ 

When you're building something new in healthcare, the instinct is to lock down requirements and ship fast. Eric Sugalski has spent his career proving why that's a mistake. Eric's journey started with a dream job at IDEO, where he fell in love with the messy, human-centered process of turning ideas into real products. He later went on to found his own design and development firm, spending fifteen years helping health technology founders bridge the gap between lab  breakthroughs and market-ready products - including work on an artificial womb for premature infants and a wearable airbag that prevents hip fractures in the elderly. In this conversation, Eric talks about why he thinks the MVP mindset is "fatally flawed" in medtech, what it was like to use his wife's pregnancy as a nine-month countdown to launch a company, and why he sold the firm he'd built for a decade and a half to finally build his own medical device: a drug delivery system designed to make one of healthcare's most error-prone manual processes as simple as removing a cap. Whether you're an engineer, a founder, or just someone who's ever wondered what it takes to bring a health technology from napkin sketch to patient bedside, this episode is okay, great. Super helpful. Appreciate it. I love the episode description you put together. No edits. Can you go ahead and put together the one sentence summary for my podcast distributor platform, a list of tags separated by commas for you. Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Connect with Eric on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/esugalski/Visit Ampulis's website: https://ampulis.com/ 

A single FDA class at Stanford changed Allison Komiyama's life. She was a neuroscience PhD student who thought she'd end up in academia. Then she discovered regulatory science and never looked back. Allison spent time as an FDA device reviewer before moving to industry, where she built and sold her own regulatory consulting firm over seven years. Now, with her new venture Blue Stocking Health, she's tackling a problem she watched play out for over a decade: founders who treat FDA clearance as the finish line, only to stall when the real challenge of getting their device to actual patients begins. In this conversation, Allison pulls back the curtain on how FDA actually thinks about risk, what reviewers want to hear in pre-submission meetings, how early design decisions can quietly lock you into a regulatory pathway, and why the best FDA interactions feel like collaboration, not confrontation. She also shares the career philosophy her father gave her as a kid that still drives everything she builds. Whether you're sketching a back-of-the-napkin illustration of your first device or preparing a 510(k), this is the regulatory conversation you'll wish you'd had years ago.Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Connect with Allison on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/allisonkomiyama/ 

Finding a lung nodule early is supposed to be good news. But for millions of patients, it means something terrifying: "We see something. We don't know what it is. Come back in six months." Joanna Nathan is the CEO of Prana Surgical, a company she spun out of Johnson & Johnson after the technology she'd watched develop one office over was about to be shelved. An immigrant entrepreneur and bioengineer, Joanna left her role running J&J's external medtech incubator to bet on a device that cores out tiny lung nodules — keeping the lung inflated, fitting between the ribs — so patients can finally get answers instead of anxiety. In this conversation, Joanna walks through the road from a freezing cabin phone call to a first-in-human study in Australia, what it took to herd four teams of lawyers through a corporate spinout, why she treats the FDA as a partner rather than a gatekeeper, and what lung cancer screening coming online means for millions of patients stuck in watchful waiting. She also reflects on what community means for medtech founders in a turbulent moment for the industry. If you've ever wondered what it really takes to pull a technology out of a giant company and build something with it — this is your episode.Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Check out Prana Surgical's webpage: https://www.pranasurgical.com/Connect with Joanna on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/joannacnathan/

What if diagnosing skin lesions didn’t require a scalpel — or even a biopsy at all? In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Gabriel Sanchez, MIT-trained engineer, Stanford PhD, and founder and CEO of Enspectra Health. Early in his engineering career at Stanford, Gabriel began to see the limits of powerful imaging technologies that never made it beyond the lab. Instead of letting that work remain siloed, he set out to bring it into real clinical care. Gabriel tells the story of shrinking a room-sized microscope into a deployable medical device, and why he believes skin pathology is overdue for the same non-invasive transformation that reshaped radiology decades ago. We talk about the 150-year-old biopsy workflow that still defines dermatology, the massive bottlenecks it creates, and why so many attempts to change it have fallen short. Along the way, Gabriel shares what it really takes to introduce a brand-new imaging modality to the FDA, why studying past failures matters more than chasing hype, and how timing, patience, and persistence shape long innovation arcs. If you’ve ever wondered how scientific insight becomes real-world impact — or how medicine’s most entrenched habits actually change — this conversation offers a rare look inside the journey. Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Check out Enspectra Health's Webpage: https://www.enspectrahealth.com/ Connect with Gabriel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabriel-sanchez-a6719837/ 

Menopause isn’t gentle. For many women, it’s a physiological shockwave — flipping sleep, mood, metabolism, cognition, sexual health, and long-term disease risk all at once. And all too often, the healthcare system’s response has essentially been: “live with it.” In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Mindy Goldman, a UCSF gynecologist and nationally recognized leader in menopause and cancer survivorship care, whose career took an unexpected turn from academic medicine into the heart of a fast-scaling women’s health startup. What began as deeply personal loss and years of clinical frustration evolved into something much larger: helping shape Midi, a menopause startup now delivering insurance-covered care to women across all 50 states.Dr. Goldman shares the formative moments that changed her trajectory, from losing her closest friend to breast cancer, to realizing how many women are dismissed, misdiagnosed, or told to simply “push through” midlife symptoms. We unpack the care gap hiding in plain sight, why menopause became a systemic blind spot in modern medicine, and how Midi is using telehealth, clinical rigor, and scale to rebuild women’s healthcare from the inside out.This is a conversation about listening to hard experiences, translating clinical insight into infrastructure, and what happens when medicine meets venture-scale ambition. If you care about health innovation that makes a massive impact, this episode shows what it takes — and why it matters now more than ever. Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Check out Midi's website: https://www.joinmidi.com/

You might be surprised to learn that a particle physicist — someone who knows how to work with massive particle accelerators slamming atoms together — is building a company focused on a sticker that sits on your abdomen. But once you dig a bit deeper, it makes perfect sense. In this episode of First in Human, I talk with Steve Axelrod, a longtime physicist turned CEO, whose entire career has been built on pulling meaningful signal out of noise. It's a skill set that's taken him from nuclear sensors at Yale all the way to Silicon Valley, ultimately as a medtech CEO working on a deeply personal problem. And along the way, what Steve discovered was unsettling: when it comes to gut-related illness, doctors often can’t measure what patients are feeling. Tests look normal. Symptoms come and go. And care is often based on educated guesswork. So Steve did what physicists do: he started measuring. We talk about why he’s now building a wearable “EKG for the gut,” how listening to electrical rhythms over days - not minutes - changes what we see, and why this approach could reshape how doctors understand chronic symptoms, recovery after surgery, and what’s really happening inside the body. This is a story about physics, family, and what happens when someone trained to study the universe turns their attention inward - and finally starts listening. Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Check out G-Tech's website: https://www.gtechmedical.com/  Connect with Steve on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveaxelrodphd/

What does it really take to decide what’s worth building in healthcare? In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Dr. Ryan Van Wert, ICU physician and serial health tech founder, to unpack how he’s built multiple companies by starting with the most vulnerable moments in medicine. From rethinking sedation for patients on ventilators, to ensuring people’s end-of-life wishes are honored, to helping adult children care for aging parents, Ryan shares how clinical pain points become startup decisions and how needs-first thinking guides what he builds. We talk about Stanford Biodesign, the discipline of needs-first innovation, and what years in the ICU teach you about human cost, timing, and focus. Ryan walks through how specific problems rose to the top during rigorous needs-finding, how his thinking has evolved across Awair, Vynca, and now Kin, and what he looks for before committing to build. If you’re a clinician, founder, or builder wondering how to choose the right problem to work on and how to build with both rigor and empathy, this conversation offers a rare, grounded look at how real healthcare companies actually get started and why that decision matters more than anything that comes next.Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Visit Kin Concierge online: https://www.kinconcierge.com/ 

It’s one thing to talk about innovation. It’s another to realize, mid-surgery, that nothing in the room was designed for your patient.In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Dr. James Wall, pediatric surgeon, serial health tech founder, and VP of Product Management and Associate Medical Officer at Intuitive, to trace his journey. It's a career that's been shaped by building where the market is small and the stakes are high. From completing advanced training in minimally invasive surgery in France to launching multiple startups, to leading pediatric innovation at Stanford, and now - most recently - helping guide the future of surgical robotics, James has spent decades navigating the tension between impact and scale. The conversation spans pediatric devices, biodesign, venture economics, and the future of surgery. But at its core, it’s about learning how to build things that matter when scale isn’t guaranteed—and why the hardest markets can produce the clearest thinking about what patients truly need. Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Connect with James: - James on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameswallmd/

Sepsis is one of medicine’s most dangerous guessing games. Patients arrive with vague symptoms. Clinicians rely on instinct. And too often, the ones who look “okay” are the ones who crash. In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Dr. Tim Sweeney, physician-scientist and founder of Inflammatix, to trace the unlikely path from a tense moment at a medical conference to a breakthrough FDA-cleared diagnostic now shaping real clinical decisions. Tim shares why leaving residency was the hardest choice he’s ever made, how years of rejected grants pushed him toward entrepreneurship, and what it took to raise more than $150M to build a diagnostic tool medicine didn’t yet have. We go inside Trivarity, a blood test that reads the immune system itself to help doctors decide whether a patient has a bacterial infection, a viral infection, or something else entirely and how sick they’re about to become. Along the way, we talk about the limits of clinical intuition, why sepsis isn’t  one disease, and how better decisions, made earlier, can change outcomes. This is a conversation about conviction, risk, and what becomes possible when we stop guessing and start listening to the biology.Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Learn more about Inflammatix: https://inflammatix.com/Tim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-sweeney-a6589594/ 

What does it take to reinvent one of the most iconic tools in medicine? In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Connor Landgraf, co-founder and CEO of Eko Health, to trace the unlikely journey from childhood tinkerer to building a digital-enabled stethoscope that’s quietly reshaping how clinicians listen, learn, and diagnose. Connor shares how a gradual realization in a Berkeley classroom led him to challenge a centuries-old design paradigm. Why do we still rely on a hollow tube and human hearing alone to evaluate heart and lung disease? From building early prototypes (which doctors promptly rejected), to the long, patient work of developing data, algorithms, and trust, this is a story about respecting medicine’s traditions while carefully pushing it forward. If you’ve ever wondered how real medical innovation gets started, or how technology can augment human judgment without erasing it, this conversation offers a rare, thoughtful look at what it really takes to change medicine from the inside out. Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Connect with Connor: - Connor's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connorlandgraf/ - Eko Health webpage: http://ekohealth.com/ 

How do you fight a disease that hides until it’s almost too late? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Maria Artunduaga, founder of Samay, whose work began with a moment she still remembers clearly: a conversation about air trapping, a flashback to high-school physics, and the realization that sound might reveal early changes inside the lungs before symptoms appear at all. That spark - in a problem inspired by the loss of her grandmother to a COPD exacerbation - sent her down a path to rethink how we detect danger in one of the world’s deadliest respiratory diseases.Maria shares the unlikely early days: late-night experiments in her living room, patients welcoming her into their homes, and the first hints that a simple wearable patch could capture some of the insights that previously required an $80,000, phone booth-sized machine. We explore why respiratory diseases have been neglected by med tech, what makes COPD so deadly, and how a founder from Colombia is building technology designed for the people most often left behind. This conversation is about invention, persistence, and what becomes possible when a eureka moment meets a problem the world can no longer ignore. Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Connect with Maria: - Maria's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drartunduaga/ - Samay webpage: https://www.samayhealth.com/home 

An innovator’s first step into the clinical environment - in this case, an ICU built for the world’s tiniest babies - can change everything. In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Eric Chehab, a Stanford-trained biomechanical engineer and founder of Novonate. We explore how a deadly but unaddressed risk in premature newborns became the focus of his life’s work. Eric shares the moment he realized that fragile infants were being protected with tape, improvisation, and sheer nursing ingenuity, and how that small, almost ordinary detail revealed a problem no one had truly solved. We follow his unusual path from a class assignment to years of crude prototypes, a slow spinout from Stanford, and the lonely stretch of building a pediatric device company in a market most investors dismiss. Eric opens up about the doubts, the early believers, and the winding strategic conversations that eventually led to Novonate’s acquisition by Laborie. If you’re curious how real needs are found, or how a simple idea can become life-changing for the smallest patients on earth, this conversation offers a rare look at the patient and determined work behind meaningful innovation. Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Connect with Eric: - Eric's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/echehab/ - Laborie webpage: https://www.laborie.com/product/lifebubble/ 

Some problems in medicine see so many failed attempts that they start to feel untouchable. Teams learn to move on, investors grow wary, and the problem becomes its own warning label. Kate Garrett and Dr. Dan Azagury chose a different path. Kate and Dan, cofounders of Ciel (later acquired by Vyaire Medical), found themelves confronted with one of those notoriously unsolved, high-stakes problems - the kind that had stopped other companies cold. What happened next changed everything for them, their patients, and for medtech. In this episode, Kate and Dan share how confronting that kind of problem shaped their partnership, what the journey taught them about trust and perseverance, and why some of the most meaningful breakthroughs begin with the problems everyone else have learned to avoid. Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Connect with Kate and Dr. Azagury: Kate Garrett's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-garrett-464920/ Dr. Dan Azagury's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-azagury-ba70733a/ 

What happens when a serial medtech founder takes on one of the most overlooked problems in public health: the simple act of finding a clean, safe place to go to the bathroom? In this episode, I sit down with Fletcher Wilson, founder and CEO of Throne Labs. His company is reimagining public bathrooms with the same precision and empathy you would expect from a medical device team. Fletcher shares how a personal struggle with GI issues, a series of raw conversations with mobile workers and city leaders, and a belief in human dignity pushed him toward an unexpected frontier. His goal is simple. Create a bathroom that feels like a hotel lobby but can sit in a Home Depot parking lot. We talk through the stories that shaped Throne. An Uber driver who carried a necktie so he could pretend to be a hotel guest. The tech stack behind their solar powered units. The design choices that have quietly saved multiple lives. Fletcher also opens up about culture, kindness, and why curiosity matters more than a perfect resume. If you have ever wondered how a basic human need becomes a systems problem, and how thoughtful design can reshape an entire city, this conversation will change the way you see public space, technology, and dignity itself. Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd Connect with Fletcher Fletcher on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fletcher-wilson-a216a16/ Visit Throne labs: https://thronelabs.co/ 

What if medical education felt less like memorization, and more like discovery?In this episode of First in Human, we sit down with Shiv Gaglani, the founder of Osmosis, to unpack the story behind how a frustrated med student turned an idea into one of the most influential learning platforms in healthcare.Shiv shares the spark that started it all—the moment he realized medicine was being taught the way it had been for a century: dense lectures, endless flashcards, and little room for real understanding. That frustration became fuel for building Osmosis, a platform designed to make learning medicine feel intuitive, visual, and human.Along the way, he opens up about the messy middle—the setbacks, the near-misses, and the lessons learned in building a company that was eventually acquired by Elsevier. We explore what it means to return to med school a decade later in the age of AI, what humans still do best, and why Shiv's newest venture is taking him from Osmosis to ... wait for it .... reverse osmosis - helping people make their homes as healthy as their habits.This is a story about curiosity, resilience, and what happens when learning itself becomes the experiment. Connect with Shiv: https://bit.ly/441n0W4 

What happens when two innovators take on a condition no one talks about - but that quietly shapes how people connect? In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Véronique Peiffer, PhD engineer, former McKinsey consultant, Stanford Biodesign fellowship alum, and co-founder of Palm. Together with her co-founder, she set out to solve excessive hand sweating, or hyperhidrosis - a condition that can make everyday moments of connection feel heavy with self-consciousness. Véronique shares how late-night brainstorms turned into a real prototype, how they built a glove-based therapy that worked, and what it took to navigate the realities of funding, regulation, and knowing when to pause.We also talk about her next chapter: distilling those lessons into The Scrappy Entrepreneur, a book for early-stage founders learning to build with heart and grit. If you’ve ever wondered what innovation really looks like behind the scenes - the human problems many of us face, and the courage it takes to solve them - this conversation will stay with you.

Ever wondered how to talk about your invention without your idea being stolen? In this episode of First in Human, we sit down with Jessica Hudak - mechanical engineer turned patent attorney and now VP of Corporate Counsel at Edwards Lifesciences = to unpack how innovators can safely move from idea to impact.You’ll hear Jessica’s journey from Stanford Biodesign to the Federal Circuit, and learn practical, plain-English answers to the biggest questions in health tech and medical devices: when to file a provisional patent, how “first to file” really works, what counts as public disclosure, and what to know about AI inventorship.Whether you’re a clinician, engineer, or founder building your first product, you’ll walk away knowing exactly how to protect what you’re creating—and why it matters.