First in Human

Send a healthy 35-year-old into orbit and their bones start dissolving ten times faster than someone on Earth with osteoporosis. Their muscles waste. Their vision degrades. It turns out, space is a biological time machine - compressing decades of aging into months. 

And that means one thing: if you solve aging in orbit, you might have solved it on Earth. 

Matthew Kuhn is a 31-year-old biomedical engineer in Houston. And on October 13, 2024, he stood in a closet holding his newborn daughter, watching a SpaceX rocket land on his phone, when he had a sudden realization: the same problems we'll need to solve to keep astronauts alive longer in orbit are the problems holding back longevity on Earth. He didn't sleep that night. By sunrise, the bet that became Skybound Medtech had taken shape. 

In this episode, we explore what happens to a body in orbit, the strange logic of dual-use medicine, and what it means to build a company at the intersection of NASA, the world's biggest medical center, and a future no one's quite built for yet. 

This episode is a different kind of conversation for the show. We usually meet builders well into the work: companies with traction, devices with data, stories already taking shape. Instead, this is a rare look from the passenger seat, at the very beginning of a founder's journey. It's an episode about diving deep into understanding an unmet need - and the vision for what might be possible. 


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 Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-t-kuhn/

Twenty-five million Americans have restless leg syndrome. For decades, the best available treatments were Parkinson's drugs - medications so problematic that three of four have now been pulled from standard of care guidelines. Patients describe the sensation as Coca-Cola running through their veins, an uncontrollable urge that steals sleep night after night. Some were told it was all in their head. 

Shri Raghunathan is a neural engineer who went from studying epilepsy and building implantable brain stimulators to CEO of Noctrix Health, the company he founded to help close the treatment gap for RLS. His device, Nidra, uses a borrowed insight from the VR world to trick the brain into thinking the legs are moving -without any actual movement. It's now standard of care therapy for RLS.

Inside this episode, you'll learn:• Why Shri spent a full year trying to kill his own idea before starting the company - and why that's the best thing a founder can do 
• The VR gaming trick that became the core mechanism behind a breakthrough medical device 
• How a small startup built the clinical evidence to go toe-to-toe with pharma - and won 
• What the "10 million nights" framework is and how Noctrix uses it to make every decision in the company
A story about what it takes to build something so good it becomes the new standard of care.
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 Noctrix Health online: https://noctrixhealth.com/

Connect with Shri on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shri-raghunathan-9b0a467/ 

Toon Overbeeke's friend had a father going through chemotherapy — and every hospital visit meant failed attempt after failed attempt to draw his blood, because chemo had damaged his veins. The question was simple: isn't there a better way?  

That question sent Toon — a mechanical engineer who'd left a partner-track career at Bain to ride a motorcycle 30,000 kilometers through Iran, Pakistan, and 28 other countries — on a mission to build something that had never existed: a fully autonomous blood-drawing robot. He

Today, as Toon is CEO of Vitestro, the company behind the Aletta system: a robot that uses infrared imaging and ultrasound to find your vein, positions the needle, and draws your blood, all without you ever seeing the needle. They've completed over 10,000 blood draws with a safety profile that beats manual phlebotomy. And elderly patients — the ones everyone assumed would resist — turned out to be the biggest fans. 

This is a conversation about robotics, human psychology, and what happens when someone refuses to accept "that's just how it's done."



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 Vitestro online: https://vitestro.com/

Connect with Toon on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/toon-overbeeke-a3012825/ 

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/