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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👤 ABOUT ANDREAS BEUST

🎙️ ABOUT PHARMA PRESCRIBED

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

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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⏱️ CHAPTERS

👤 ABOUT GRAHAM ALLCOTT

🎙️ ABOUT PHARMA PRESCRIBED

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

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 

⏱️ CHAPTERS

👤 ABOUT ADAM WALKER (GUEST)

🎙️ ABOUT PHARMA PRESCRIBED

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

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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👤 ABOUT LISA KERR

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Alen Hadzic — founder and CEO of Clinical Trial Scan, Olympic fencer and patent-pending inventor of Dyno AI — joins Adam Walker for one of the most data-driven conversations on the Pharma Prescribed Podcast.

Alen's path to clinical trials started with Facebook ads, a friend called Artyom, and $5–7 million in advertising spend across 50 studies. When margins got squeezed, he didn't walk away — he took control of the funnel, built a predictive AI that calculates the true cost per enrollment before a study starts, and filed a patent on the methodology.

His golden rule: just show up. Kobe Bryant said it best.

🎧 LISTEN ON YOUR PREFERRED APP

Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/alen-hadzic-on-engineering-clinical-trial-enrollment/id1829715970?i=1000775363752 

Youtube → https://youtu.be/02tkkvXY4VU?si=-6PyzKLqEqWK-E-T

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⏱️ CHAPTERS

👤 ABOUT ALEN HADZIC

🎙️ ABOUT PHARMA PRESCRIBED

#AlenHadzic #ClinicalTrialScan #DynoAI #PatientRecruitment #ClinicalTrials #PharmaPrescribed #AdamWalker #CostPerEnrollment #MonteCarlo #DigitalAdvertising #FacebookAds #OlympicFencer #LifeSciences #ClinicalResearch #PatentPending

Dr.Pat Boulogne — performance optimisation strategist, functional medicine expert and bestselling author — joins Adam Walker for one of the most practical wellbeing conversations on the Pharma Prescribed Podcast.

Dr.Pat is 71, takes zero medications, works 14-hour days with full mental clarity, and has spent 30+ years helping high performers close the gap between where they are and where they want to be. Her father wanted her to be an electrical engineer. She chose to become an engineer of life and health instead.

Her approach is pharma unprescribed.

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👤 ABOUT DR. PAT BOULOGNE

🎙️ ABOUT PHARMA PRESCRIBED

#DrPatBoulogne #FunctionalMedicine #PerformanceOptimisation #PharmaPrescribed #AdamWalker #IntermittentFasting #RootCause #Wellbeing #Nutrition #ThreeBrains #Affirmations #OrganicFood #Microbiome #GutHealth #HealthyAging

Dermot Whelan — broadcaster, comedian, bestselling author and certified meditation teacher — joins Adam Walker for one of the most personal and practical conversations on the Pharma Prescribed Podcast.

This episode holds a special place — meeting Dermot in Prague in early 2025, 

Dermot left his radio show at Today FM at the height of its ratings to dedicate himself full-time to making mindfulness accessible. In this conversation, he shares the panic attack in 2007 that changed everything, why stress has terrible marketing, and the simple tools — including Navy SEAL box breathing — that can shift your nervous system in just 16 seconds.

Adam opens up about his own breakdown following his father's stroke, and how meeting Dermot at a conference in Prague in early 2025 became a turning point. Raw, warm, and full of practical frameworks you can use today.

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👤 ABOUT DERMOT WHELAN

🎙️ ABOUT PHARMA PRESCRIBED

#DermotWhelan #Mindfulness #BusyAndWrecked #MentalHealth #Meditation #Burnout #BoxBreathing #PharmaPrescribed #Wellbeing #StressManagement

⚠️ This episode discusses suicide, traumatic brain injury, and grief. Please take care if these topics are difficult for you.

Sharmila Hume — known as the "Biomedic Detective" — joins Adam Walker for one of the most profound and wide-ranging conversations on the Pharma Prescribed Podcast.

Originally trained as a telecoms engineer, Sharmila rebuilt her life after her own battle with ME and fibromyalgia, then spent months in Mexico rehabilitating her brother Arnie after a near-fatal head-on collision with a drunk driver. When Arnie later died by suicide, Sharmila connected the dots between his unaddressed traumatic brain injury and his death — and turned that grief into a mission.

Today she runs the Headstrong campaign and her Bioperformance System, using German bioresonance technology to treat the body as a communication network — identifying and clearing the disruptions that conventional medicine misses. This is a conversation about what we overlook, and what it costs us.

Adam also opens up about the death of his sister Naomi by suicide, and the striking connections between viral meningitis, brain function, and the mental health crisis that followed.

Recorded during Mental Health Awareness Week.

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👤 ABOUT SHARMILA HUME

🎙️ ABOUT PHARMA PRESCRIBED

#SharmilHume #BrainInjury #SuicidePrevention #MentalHealth #TBI #Bioresonance #Headstrong #LongCovid #MEfibromyalgia #PharmaPrescribed #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek #AdamWalker

Bilal Bham — founder and CEO of Amodaia — joins Adam Walker to explore what it really takes to guide a biotech, pharma or medtech company through its most critical decision points.

Bilal brings nearly two decades of life sciences experience across regulatory affairs, medical affairs, market access, marketing communications and fundraising. But what sets him apart is the lens through which he approaches all of it: lived experience. His own journey with Graves' disease and thyroid eye disease, alongside family mental health challenges and his experience as an autistic leader, has shaped a consultancy built around the belief that science and human perspective are inseparable.

This is a conversation about the gap between clinical data and commercial reality — and what it takes to close it.

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📖 WHAT WE COVER

⏱️ CHAPTERS

👤 ABOUT BILAL BHAM

🎙️ ABOUT PHARMA PRESCRIBED

#BilalBham #Amodaia #LifeSciences #Biotech #PharmaStrategy #MarketAccess #RegulatoryAffairs #PatientFirst #PharmaPrescribed #AdamWalker #HealthcareLeadership #Neurodiversity