Adam Walker’s Pharma Prescribed Podcast

Henrik Nakskov | An AI Can't Ask Questions of the Future - Data Trust in Clinical Research | Pharma Prescribed

Henrik Nakskov is a Danish life sciences specialist with more than 20 years in clinical drug development — a medical chemist by training who became one of the field's more original thinkers on data integrity. He spent a decade at Novo Nordisk in haematology and coagulation, held senior roles at NNIT, and led biometrics at Symphogen. That experience now runs through three companies: Sims Consult (his life sciences consultancy), Novyra Life Sciences (where he's CEO and Clinical Information Management Lead), and Safe Implant Technology (where he leads the science).

Henrik cares more about where data comes from than almost anyone. In this episode he explains how he borrowed from Second World War supply-chain theory and Toyota's just-in-time management to rebuild the way trial data is collected and cleaned — taking last-patient-out to database release from a normal 8–12 weeks down to one week, and in some studies to two days. He tells the story of trauma trials collecting 1,102 data points in three hours under conditions of war and car accidents, and of mapping the full chain of a stroke patient's care — onset, admission, CT scan, treatment — so precisely the FDA used it to teach what data intelligence actually means.

Then the conversation turns to AI, where Henrik is refreshingly precise. He runs Grok and ChatGPT against each other to hunt for the "black holes," builds explicit frameworks and guardrails so the models can't wander, and makes a sharp philosophical point: an AI can only work from references it has already learned — it cannot ask a genuinely new question of the future, so the more you use it, the more surveillance your safety monitoring needs to compensate for the unknowns you've introduced.

Coaching over policing, trust over box-ticking, and a continuous-monitoring vision for where quality is heading. A masterclass for anyone who works with clinical data.

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Youtube: https://youtu.be/9ZbJ9PXOJBM 

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👤 ABOUT HENRIK NAKSKOV

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#HenrikNakskov #DataIntegrity #ClinicalDataManagement #ClinicalTrials #AIinPharma #Biometrics #PharmaPrescribed #ClinicalInformatics #DataIntelligence #QMS #DrugDevelopment

Dr Sonit Handa | Building a Tumour tissue bank for $1M a day Children’s Cancer Research and Treatment Centre | Pharma Prescribed

Dr Sonit Handa is the founder and CEO of Biovance Consulting, where he helps biopharma leaders navigate global launches, operating-model transformations and post-merger integrations. He trained as a physician in India, then moved to the United States — drawn to the intersection of medicine, science, technology and business.

His path started with a swerve. Watching everyone around him in medical school run the same race toward the same specialties, Sonit went looking for the thing beyond traditional medicine. He found it in the late-90s wave of medical transcription being outsourced to India — his first glimpse of technology transforming healthcare — and followed it into biomedical and tissue engineering in the US.

That led to St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis: a non-profit where no family pays for treatment, funded entirely by donation to the tune of roughly a million dollars a day. Sonit was hired to build the operations of its tissue bank — 25 years of samples stored without a proper database — so researchers could actually find and request what they needed and turn it into discoveries for children with cancer. He's candid about how he got there: cold emails through the night, visa deadlines, and one CSO in the city he was already living in who wrote back.

From there the conversation opens out into the ideas that run through his work: why culture is an emotion you feel, not a line in a job description; why EQ will matter as much as IQ for the next generation; why change management is the one discipline AI makes non-negotiable; and the ethics of drug pricing seen from both sides of the world.

Warm, wide-ranging and genuinely reflective — a reminder that, looking back, the dots connect.

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👤 ABOUT DR SONIT HANDA

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#SonitHanda #BiovanceConsulting #StJude #ChangeManagement #LifeSciences #PharmaPrescribed #PharmaConsulting #EQatWork #AIandWork #MarketAccess #PostMergerIntegration

Gerrie Hawes on the HOPE Framework: How Behaviour, Not Strategy, Actually Changes Organisations | Pharma Prescribed

Gerrie Hawes is a corporate behavioural psychologist who works in boardrooms and on stages, helping leaders turn strategy into behaviour people actually adopt. She's worked behind the scenes with most of the pharmaceutical companies you could name — a self-described "hidden person," which makes her a fitting guest for a podcast about hidden voices.

She opens with a story that reframes the whole conversation. Coaching a global IT leader on her opening speech, Gerrie asked her a question no one asks an IT director: "Why do you work here — you could work anywhere?" The leader paused, reached into her handbag, and produced a family photograph. Lung cancer. "They're dead, and they're dead." She'd chosen that company because it was at the leading edge of the treatment. That, Gerrie told her, is what you tell your team — not the strategy, the why beneath it.

From there Gerrie unpacks her HOPE framework — Happiness, Optimism, Playfulness, Empathy — a practitioner's model for the human dynamics that strategy decks miss. She explains why she hunts for a specific kind of laughter in the room (the edge between the learning zone and the panic zone), why happiness starts with the self but can't end there, and why empathetic leadership means understanding what drives other people, not assuming they're driven by what drives you.

She's also clear-eyed on AI: the more it can do, the more the durable human advantage becomes the things it can't — playfulness, genuine empathy, reading the space between people. Plus boundaries, burnout, toxic cultures, upward empathy, and the quiet power of listening and introversion.

A thoughtful, practical conversation about the behaviours that actually move organisations — long after the away-day is over.

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#GerrieHawes #HOPEFramework #BehaviouralScience #Leadership #OrganisationalCulture #PharmaPrescribed #ChangeLeadership #EmpatheticLeadership #WorkplaceCulture #AIandWork #Burnout

Clive Bonny on Atrial Fibrillation, Blood Thinners & the "Sudden Death Syndrome" Nobody Checks For | Pharma Prescribed

⚠️ This episode discusses suicide and bereavement. If you're affected, please reach out to a professional or a crisis line — in the UK, Samaritans are available free on 116 123, day or night.

Clive Bonny is a management consultant and business advisor of 36 years, specialising in responsible business standards, intellectual property protection and ethical, outcome-driven leadership. He's also a health advocate who lives with atrial fibrillation and is a prostate cancer survivor — and in this episode, business and biology meet.

Clive and host Adam Walker discover how much they share: both live with AF, both lost a sibling to suicide, both were endurance athletes. That common ground makes for an unusually open conversation about what AF actually feels like, how it's diagnosed — often by accident — and why Clive calls it "sudden death syndrome": nearly a million people in the UK have it, and many don't know until it's too late. His practical message is simple: check your pulse, and if it's consistently low, ask for a test.

Clive shares his own dramatic diagnosis — a resting pulse of 30 discovered on an operating table, two weeks in intensive care, heparin, cardioversion, a pacemaker and an ablation — the same ablation procedure Adam was himself about to undergo. Both discuss life on long-term anticoagulation (DOACs) and the different level of cardiac care that followed.

The conversation ranges wider too: Clive's career innovating for Bayer and Hoechst, taking inventions through IP protection and clinical trials, robotic prostate surgery, and building social value through local volunteering.

Honest, warm and genuinely useful — two patients comparing notes in public so others don't get caught out.

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👤 ABOUT CLIVE BONNY

https://consult-smp.com

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ℹ️ Nothing in this episode is medical advice. Views on treatments and devices are personal experience only — always consult a qualified clinician about your own care.

#CliveBonny #AtrialFibrillation #AFib #DOAC #Anticoagulants #ProstateCancer #PharmaPrescribed #PatientVoice #HeartHealth #MedicalDevices #ResponsibleBusiness

Ashish Rishi on The Patients Clinical Trials Leave Out — and the Evidence That Counts Them In | Pharma Prescribed 

Ashish Rishi is Founder and CEO of Unwritten Health, the Manchester-based patient experience data platform working to make life science's evidence reflect the people it's meant to serve.

His mission is unsentimental — and it starts with his father. At 17, Ash watched his dad spend three years fighting for a GP referral for worsening back and bone pain. The eventual diagnosis was terminal prostate cancer, delivered to an 18-year-old and his mother — for whom English is a fourth language — in a two-minute conversation and a flyer, with no family network to turn to. His father lived six more years and passed away three months before Ash's graduation.

That experience became a company. In this episode Ash explains "inclusion debt" — his term for how bias compounds at every stage of drug development: unmet need defined without the real patient voice, multi-billion-pound programmes built on focus groups of eight to ten patient experts, recruitment budgets thrown at social ads that reach the already-reachable, and value dossiers that carry only the majority narrative. By market access, it's too late to fix.

The Patients Clinical Trials Leave Out — and the Evidence That Counts Them In

His answer is Equity Engine: a 6,000-strong UK participant panel profiled across the social determinants of health, built through gurdwaras, mosques, temples, churches and community groups, generating longitudinal lived-experience data at a scale focus groups never could — and turning it into submission-ready evidence.

Honest about being a "failed scientist," about burnout and anger, and about the trust he has to earn in every room. A powerful conversation about fixing inequity as an evidence and design problem, not just a moral one.

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Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/@pharmaprescribedpodcast

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#AshishRishi #UnwrittenHealth #InclusionDebt #HealthEquity #ClinicalTrials #ClinicalTrialDiversity #PharmaPrescribed #PatientExperience #SocialDeterminantsOfHealth #RWE #HealthInequality

Louise Callin on dementia, photos sparking conversation & making care more human | Pharma Prescribed

Louise Callin — founder and CEO of ReelLife Conversations — joins Adam Walker for a warm and moving conversation about dementia, human connection and building technology that makes care more human, not less.

After nearly 30 years leading technology and transformation for global corporations including American Express, Louise left to build something with more direct impact. Her mother's dementia journey inspired the idea: photos aren't a memory test, they're a conversation waiting to happen. ReelLife Conversations uses AI to turn family photographs into dementia-friendly conversation prompts — analysing each picture for colours, objects and places, then linking one photo naturally to the next. She's since secured venture capital investment and is building partnerships across the UK and internationally.

Adam and Louise met at a conference — and her energy is unmistakable.

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Youtube → https://youtu.be/wq1GShCpCYE 

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#LouiseCallin #ReelLifeConversations #Dementia #DementiaCare #PharmaPrescribed #AdamWalker #SocialCare #NonPharmacological #CaregiverSupport #WomenAndDementia #DigitalHealth #HumanConnection #Alzheimers #DementiaFriendly #Wellbeing

Andreas Beust on how a small CRO covers the globe without growing | Pharma Prescribed

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. He's also President of ACROS — the Association of International CROs — and a guest lecturer at the University of Bremen.

He started on the biostatistics desk. He's now running the company, elected by a leader who — not yet 50 — went looking for a successor because clinical research moves too fast to leave succession to chance.

In this episode Andreas makes complex things accessible, which is his stated mission. He explains the ACROS model: ten similarly-sized, like-minded CROs from the US to Europe, the Middle East, India, China and Australia, who agree that once a partner joins, their country is off-limits to the others. It lets a small CRO run trials globally — 20 concurrent studies across Spain, Italy and Portugal through one trusted partner — without ballooning into the kind of large, rigid, expensive organisation that can't serve smaller sponsors. Grow together, not bigger.

He's refreshingly frank on AI: a lot of overpromise and underdeliver, quarter-of-a-million-per-seat licence fees that no small or mid-size company can pay, and real but modest gains in medical writing, programming and knowledge capture — always human in the loop.

And he's honest about the thing that actually drives growth: discomfort. Curiosity, listening first, and putting yourself in the shop window of the unknown.

An optimistic, grounded conversation about how the human end of this industry actually works — and how to break into it.

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#AndreasBeust #GCPService #ACROS #CRO #ClinicalResearch #ClinicalTrials #PharmaPrescribed #AIinPharma #ClinicalTrialCareers #GCP #ContractResearch

Graham Allcott on Kind, Psychological Safety & the Quiet Power of Kindness | Pharma Prescribe

Graham Allcott — bestselling author of How to Be a Productivity Ninja and Kind: The Quiet Power of Kindness at Work — joins Adam Walker for a conversation about why the ruthless-boss archetype is scientifically wrong.

Graham founded Think Productive, now operating across the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands. His latest book won the 2025 Leadership Book of the Year from the Institute of Leadership and a Business Book Award. His argument is simple and evidence-backed: kindness builds trust, trust builds psychological safety, and psychologically safe teams outperform everyone else.

Adam and Graham first met at the Sussex University Kindness Conference. This is the conversation that followed.

🎧 LISTEN ON YOUR PREFERRED APP Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/episode/04glB17p7bBWVmLjlwIO7z?si=WfiLpCsPQuatGlGcV2_NQQ Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/graham-allcott-on-kind-psychological-safety-the-quiet/id1829715970?i=1000778402287 Amazon Music → https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/1a43eb87-b83e-441d-9a87-321263e3f821/episodes/dd83fbdb-4053-468f-8486-9e346073b5f6/adam-walker%E2%80%99s-pharma-prescribed-podcast-graham-allcott-on-kind-psychological-safety-the-quiet-power-of-kindness-pharma-prescribed 

Youtube → https://youtu.be/1i1_TIZRBmI 

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👤 ABOUT GRAHAM ALLCOTT

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#GrahamAllcott #Kind #KindnessAtWork #ThinkProductive #ProductivityNinja #PharmaPrescribed #AdamWalker #PsychologicalSafety #Leadership #WorkplaceCulture #SethGodin #Busyness #SlowMovement #Trust #Wellbeing

Adam Walker interviews namesake Adam Walker; GMP, Sepsis & 900k NHS Doses a Year | Pharma Prescribed

Two Adam Walkers, one conversation. This week the host is joined by his namesake — Adam Walker, Qualified Person, Head of Development and Innovation at the North East and North Cumbria Medicines Manufacturing Centre, and co-founder of the Help Me GMP educational platform.

Adam qualified as an NHS pharmacist in 2003 and quickly realised the clean room, not the ward, was where he could do the most good. In this episode he explains the quiet revolution underway in NHS pharmaceutical manufacturing: a new hub-and-spoke model, one of four national aseptic pathfinder hubs, and a brand-new facility in Northumberland going live in 2027 — built to produce around 150,000 chemotherapy doses and up to 750,000 ready-to-administer antibiotic doses a year.

The patient impact is immediate. A ready-made antibiotic bag pulled from a fridge means the one-hour door-to-needle target for suspected sepsis is met, and nurses get 12–15 minutes per dose back for patient care.

Then the conversation turns personal. Adam shares his "why" — his mother's Grade 4 metastatic bowel cancer diagnosis in 2003, her remarkable response to the FOLFOX regimen, and the nine extra years it bought: his wedding, meeting his first son. It's why he gets up in the morning.

He also opens up on mentorship, Annex 1, and building Help Me GMP for the "TikTok generation" of pharma professionals.

Two disciplines — GMP and GCP — one shared mission: getting the right medicine to the patient at the right time.

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Youtube: https://youtu.be/2MoNyxxkDiE 

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#AdamWalker #HelpMeGMP #GMP #NHS #AsepticProcessing #MedicinesManufacturing #PharmaPrescribed #PatientSafety #Chemotherapy #Sepsis #QualifiedPerson #Pharma

Lisa Kerr on why 95% of eligible patients never join a clinical trial | Pharma Prescribed

Lisa Kerr is Head of Patient Engagement at Evinova, AstraZeneca's health tech business — a PhD chemist who climbed to global project director, hit a cliff edge, and came back with a mission.

In this episode Lisa talks openly about the divorce, the clinical depression, and the three months as an outpatient at the Priory that reshaped her career. She founded AstraZeneca's Safe Space employee resource group after one Workplace post she thought would end her career — and built mental health navigation tools that scaled globally.

She then turns that lived experience on the industry itself: only 5–7% of eligible patients ever join a clinical trial, and that number has barely moved in a decade despite digitisation and healthcare transformation. Lisa explains the EACH framework, why patients are the real investors in a trial (time, health, trust — given for free), and why AI has just destroyed pharma's last excuse for not designing trials with patients.

Honest, funny, and unusually direct. No soundbites, no spin.

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