First in Human

David Hindin
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First in Human is a podcast about the stories, sparks, and spirit of health innovation. Hosted by Dr. David Hindin - a trauma surgeon, storyteller, and health technology strategist - each episode explores the human side of breakthrough ideas in medicine. From the first sketch on a napkin to the first patient helped, we go behind the scenes with the founders, clinicians, and creative minds pushing healthcare forward. Whether you're in medicine, tech, design, or just curious about how change happens in complex systems, this show offers an honest, inspiring look at what it takes to build something that could save a life.

  1. HACE 18 H

    His Wife Was Pregnant. He Gave Himself 9 Months to Start a Company

    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/

    47 min

  2. 17 FEB

    Office Hours: A Former FDA Reviewer on the Mistakes Founders Keep Making

    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/

    39 min

  3. 10 FEB

    This CEO Is Helping Lung Cancer Patients Told to "Just Wait"

    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/

    44 min

  4. 3 FEB

    What If You Never Needed a Skin Biopsy Again? This CEO Is Making it Possible.

    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/

    51 min

  5. 27 ENE

    Doctors Said "Just Live With It." Her Team Built a $1B Startup Instead

    Menopause isn’t gentle. For many women, it’s a physiological shockwave — flipping sleep, mood, metabolism, cognition, sexual health, and long-term disease risk all at once. And all too often, the healthcare system’s response has essentially been: “live with it.” In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Mindy Goldman, a UCSF gynecologist and nationally recognized leader in menopause and cancer survivorship care, whose career took an unexpected turn from academic medicine into the heart of a fast-scaling women’s health startup. What began as deeply personal loss and years of clinical frustration evolved into something much larger: helping shape Midi, a menopause startup now delivering insurance-covered care to women across all 50 states.Dr. Goldman shares the formative moments that changed her trajectory, from losing her closest friend to breast cancer, to realizing how many women are dismissed, misdiagnosed, or told to simply “push through” midlife symptoms. We unpack the care gap hiding in plain sight, why menopause became a systemic blind spot in modern medicine, and how Midi is using telehealth, clinical rigor, and scale to rebuild women’s healthcare from the inside out.This is a conversation about listening to hard experiences, translating clinical insight into infrastructure, and what happens when medicine meets venture-scale ambition. If you care about health innovation that makes a massive impact, this episode shows what it takes — and why it matters now more than ever. 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 Midi's website: https://www.joinmidi.com/

    54 min

  6. 20 ENE

    Why This CEO Is Building an EKG for the Gut - Literally

    You might be surprised to learn that a particle physicist — someone who knows how to work with massive particle accelerators slamming atoms together — is building a company focused on a sticker that sits on your abdomen. But once you dig a bit deeper, it makes perfect sense. In this episode of First in Human, I talk with Steve Axelrod, a longtime physicist turned CEO, whose entire career has been built on pulling meaningful signal out of noise. It's a skill set that's taken him from nuclear sensors at Yale all the way to Silicon Valley, ultimately as a medtech CEO working on a deeply personal problem. And along the way, what Steve discovered was unsettling: when it comes to gut-related illness, doctors often can’t measure what patients are feeling. Tests look normal. Symptoms come and go. And care is often based on educated guesswork. So Steve did what physicists do: he started measuring. We talk about why he’s now building a wearable “EKG for the gut,” how listening to electrical rhythms over days - not minutes - changes what we see, and why this approach could reshape how doctors understand chronic symptoms, recovery after surgery, and what’s really happening inside the body. This is a story about physics, family, and what happens when someone trained to study the universe turns their attention inward - and finally starts listening. 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 G-Tech's website: https://www.gtechmedical.com/  Connect with Steve on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveaxelrodphd/

    44 min

  7. 13 ENE

    3 Startups, 1 Rule: Building Companies from the ICU's Clues

    What does it really take to decide what’s worth building in healthcare? In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Dr. Ryan Van Wert, ICU physician and serial health tech founder, to unpack how he’s built multiple companies by starting with the most vulnerable moments in medicine. From rethinking sedation for patients on ventilators, to ensuring people’s end-of-life wishes are honored, to helping adult children care for aging parents, Ryan shares how clinical pain points become startup decisions and how needs-first thinking guides what he builds. We talk about Stanford Biodesign, the discipline of needs-first innovation, and what years in the ICU teach you about human cost, timing, and focus. Ryan walks through how specific problems rose to the top during rigorous needs-finding, how his thinking has evolved across Awair, Vynca, and now Kin, and what he looks for before committing to build. If you’re a clinician, founder, or builder wondering how to choose the right problem to work on and how to build with both rigor and empathy, this conversation offers a rare, grounded look at how real healthcare companies actually get started and why that decision matters more than anything that comes next.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 Kin Concierge online: https://www.kinconcierge.com/

    48 min

  8. 6 ENE

    Nothing in the OR Was Built For His Patient.

    It’s one thing to talk about innovation. It’s another to realize, mid-surgery, that nothing in the room was designed for your patient.In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Dr. James Wall, pediatric surgeon, serial health tech founder, and VP of Product Management and Associate Medical Officer at Intuitive, to trace his journey. It's a career that's been shaped by building where the market is small and the stakes are high. From completing advanced training in minimally invasive surgery in France to launching multiple startups, to leading pediatric innovation at Stanford, and now - most recently - helping guide the future of surgical robotics, James has spent decades navigating the tension between impact and scale. The conversation spans pediatric devices, biodesign, venture economics, and the future of surgery. But at its core, it’s about learning how to build things that matter when scale isn’t guaranteed—and why the hardest markets can produce the clearest thinking about what patients truly 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 Connect with James: - James on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameswallmd/

    43 min
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First in Human is a podcast about the stories, sparks, and spirit of health innovation. Hosted by Dr. David Hindin - a trauma surgeon, storyteller, and health technology strategist - each episode explores the human side of breakthrough ideas in medicine. From the first sketch on a napkin to the first patient helped, we go behind the scenes with the founders, clinicians, and creative minds pushing healthcare forward. Whether you're in medicine, tech, design, or just curious about how change happens in complex systems, this show offers an honest, inspiring look at what it takes to build something that could save a life.

Información

  • Creador
    David Hindin
  • Años de actividad
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodios
    23
  • Clasificación
    Apto
  • Copyright
    © 2025 David Hindin
  • Mostrar sitio web
    First in Human