Medical research

... uh, that as an organization.

And, um, but, you know, life goes on and I, um, I stood down because I'm also on the board of the Ingham Institute, uh, for Medical Research, uh, based in Liverpool.

Right.

And we recently opened a facility at MacArthur.

Yeah.

Uh, sorry, in Campbelltown.

Um, so the Ingham Institute is just the next level of, uh, medical research.

Uh, it is a unique structure.

I'm Nav, your host, and I'm joined by my partner colleague, Valentina Sartori from our Zurich office.

I'm also very excited to introduce our guest for today, Christian Diehl, Chief Data and Digital Officer of Biomedical Research at Novartis.

Novartis is one of the world's top five pharma companies, and this is the first appearance on Eureka.

So we are thrilled to dive into how Christian and his team are bringing digital transformation to the heart of scientific discovery.

Very inspiring, Christian.

And can I ask you, how do you describe your role today to someone outside the pharma world? What problems do you wake up to solve for scientists every day?

Yeah, so I'm in biomedical research for a pharma company and drug discovery is difficult and challenging.

And so many drug candidates that look very promising somehow fail along the way and never become drugs.

So it's about really capturing the opportunity of a new university with merged capabilities at scale and thinking about how that opportunity is going to resonate in building ecosystems.

And so one of the key roles for myself is to think about the College of Health and importantly, the health research ecosystem.

the partnerships that are needed to be built in order to establish that connected ecosystem, and then think about how we can layer on aspects of innovation, innovative teaching, research courses, skilled capacity and workforce.

So that's kind of what keeps me busy.

it really is about actually understanding how we are all going to achieve that and more likely to achieve it by being in partnership.

So there's a few things I want to ask now.

Coming from the science communication side of town, as I do, and also I do have an ancient history in working in mental health research for consumers of mental health services back in, I would say, how long ago? And I'm very interested where you say one of your partner's Are there consumers, I assume you mean consumers of health services and research and so forth.

Can you tell me a little bit more about that? What does that look like? Is it easy too? Because reaching the consumers or, you know, what people sort of blithely call the public is one of the more complex things that we have to do, particularly when we're eggheads, quite frankly, and, you know, elitist, not elitist, elite and expert.

We had to get her into a trial to save her life.

The crowdfunding company I was working on at the time was in the medical research space doing funding for deep tech, finding new avenues to capital for

deep tech.

And so that meant I was dangerous when it came to medical research.

I knew my way around it and I knew how to use tagging and the jargon.

So I went and looked for trial information and found the trial information, even though centralized, was not robust, dynamic information.

The authors argued that academic medicine has an opportunity and an obligation to help fill this space, but doing so requires honestly examining how the academy undervalues quality improvement research.

In a 2009 report, Conflicts of Interest in Medical Research, Education, and Practice, The National Academy of Medicine, formerly the Institute of Medicine, recognized that disclosure of the relevant financial interests of members of guideline development panels should be sufficiently specific and comprehensive so that it helps others judge the severity of the conflicts of interest.

A new commentary discusses how, in practice, conflict of interest disclosures in U.S. clinical practice guidelines have become important.

uninterpretable, often including a long list of company names and payment types without the context needed to adequately assess the risk of bias.

He was on it for a while too.

Dr. Nick Coatsworth will be with us for health leading into Medical Research Giving Day, a very important day on the medical calendar.

For travel today, we're off to India.

Never been.

When we get on to Dr Nick Coatsworth, we'll talk health.

It's an important topic today.

Medical Research Giving Day.

And it's the inaugural one.

Lovely.

So we're here to pull the curtain back on medical research, give you some more information, hopefully, that makes you feel like you can trust the outcomes of research or at least what's going on that you may not know about beforehand.

And today we're going to do another Q&A.

So we're going to try and answer some of your questions.

question

next question

yes okay here is a suggestion a topic suggestion from andrew thanks andrew Andrew asks, due to the current medical research landscape in the U.S., what can we as civilians look for in studies to gauge their validity? I know that reading through the entire study and interrogating their methodology is going to be best, but are there any frameworks or organizations that we can look for or can look for a lack thereof? as a quick shorthand, if we should take research seriously.

You all, being me and Debbie, talk a lot about best practices, and I guess I'm curious how many of those are going to make it into published works that we might have visibility into, or where we might be able to go where these things would be stated outside of the published work.

Yeah, it makes you wonder.

And a lot of times there are people that will say, the fact that women just have not really been studied I think there's some literature that states, I think it was like in the early 90s is when women and their health were really starting to be looked at when it came to medical research and such like that.

A lot of things that happen in medicine or that have been geared towards treatment and interventions are because men were actually studied, not women.

And that's something that I think a lot of people have no clue about, that the female body is so understudied.

With the subject

of medical research, we know what helps with medical research, which is funding.

I mean, so many labs have been shut down because of Doge.

And it's not unconnected from AI because the justification that these Doge incels gave for cutting so much medical research is that-

Big boss.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We're going to have, we're going to have, AI is going to solve these problems.