Category: News

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December 2023 update

I stopped posting updates to this blog almost one year ago. At the time, I was deeply involved in producing yet another academic paper (It’s out!) and we had just had our second child.

I still like the process of writing my ideas and sharing them with others. But the process has become too time consuming. And, sadly, the payoff in a noisy world is pretty thin.

Having some experience of the whole key-opinion-leader (KOL) process I don’t think that I’m ever going to be very successful on that path.

Decisions

Three key decisions are relevant for the current post

  1. Commission somebody to redesign this site. I need to make it more navigable, so that you the reader can access the more relevant posts on your first visit.
  2. Post considerably less frequently. Yes I will begin to write again, but the articles will only be posted after the redesign.
  3. Display a thread of some of my most relevant articles as a first contact point for the interim. (Coming next week).

About me

I am still a life-sciences and technology founder. I still prefer the technical rather than business role, although I frequently do both albeit rarely at the same time. I came very close to founding a Software-as-a-InVitro-Diagnostic (SaIVD) company in 2023, unfortunately our hopes did not come to fruition. I earn my income from advising others on Team, Architecture and Build. Mostly I get paid to solve serious problems. I also do due diligence for investors.

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2020 coming to an end

The past two end-of-years I have wanted to write a bilan de l’année. Both years were incredibly exciting and I had a lot to look back on. In both cases I wrote the notes for myself but never published them on the site. I guess that, while it is both useful and healthy to keep a monitor of how things have gone, I am not so keen on going public on these topics.

2020 has been a particularly unusual year. I am not excited about what I did this year. But I have to admit that this year, despite the obvious difficulties, brought a welcome return to modes of work which agree with me and, frankly, a blistering level of productivity.

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New article: My experience of the BIA Pulse accelerator

I wrote recently about my experiences of the Pulse leadership and entrepreneurship training program for the blog of the UK BioIndustry Association (BIA). The Pulse course is organised jointly by the BIA and the Francis Crick Institute. I joined the three-day course, in its first year of operation, in 2018.

I felt that I benefited enormously from the course. I had left my postdoc position 3 months previously and I was researching ideas for setting-up a company. I subsequently took my learnings from Pulse and elsewhere, and established my first company Simmunology. So when I was contacted earlier this year I was particularly keen to write something and say thanks.

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New hosting

I have had to move my website hosting this week. I was hosted by the computer society at National University of Ireland, Galway for many years. Their hardware is now on its last legs and the building it is hosted in has been turned into a field hospital for Covid patients. It was time to move on.

Many thanks to Compsoc at NUI Galway for the years of hosting.

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Talks cancelled – Talks online

I had quite a nice spring season of talks planned for 2020. I was invited to deliver a keynote on AI in Healthcare at Biovaria. And, I was one of the invited speakers for the Dynamics of Immune Repertoires conference where I would also have given a workshop, in Dresden. Covid-19 struck and the rest is history.

Emergencies lead to quick changes of plans. Anthony Kelly from AI in Action reached out to me asking me to take part in a special on AI in Healthcare.

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Preprint Announcement – AI in Medicine Product Development Framework

Working in industrial research is usually very motivating but occasionally it is also frustrating. You’ve just done something really cool but you’re not allowed to tell anybody outside the company about it. Indeed, in a small company there might not be anybody inside of the company who can even appreciate it!

I have worked on roughly 4 really cool projects since leaving academia at the end of 2017. And apart from some basic mentions in my blog (e.g. here and here) most of what I have done has been known only to a few key stakeholders.

Since leaving Fosanis last September I have had a visiting researcher affiliation at the Digital Health Accelerator of the Berlin Institute of Health. I have used my time to mentor a cohort of teams attempting to spin out their ideas; to work on a causal inference project; and, to write a paper about the structural aspects of medical AI products. This week, along with my co-author Vince Madai, we submitted that paper.

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Invited Speaker: Dynamics of Immune Responses

I have been invited to speak at the Dynamics of Immune Responses workshop/seminar/conference in May-June 2020. The invitation arose through my previous efforts to found a company in this space.

There is a growing awareness in the field of immunology of the potential for using mathematical techniques. The wedge-issue here is the cascade of data appearing via new cytometry techniques; large-data looks like a math issue to most people. I of course come from the other side of a spectrum – everything looks like a math issue to me – I wanted to stimulate drug development which engages with immune system dynamics by founding my company.

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