Lab to Lives

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A medicine can look perfect and still be wrong, and that gap between appearance and reality is where patients get hurt. We sit down with Dave Chametzky, who spent decades working alongside the pharmaceutical industry’s legal and protection efforts, to talk candidly about counterfeit drugs, how quickly fakes can hit the market, and what everyday buyers can do to lower their risk when shopping online.

We also get personal about what happens when a long pharma career ends, and why rebuilding identity matters as much as landing the next role. Dave shares the story behind his book, When Your Heart Says It’s Your Time To Soar, and we pull on a simple thread that becomes a bigger theme: your first love should be you. That lens changes how we think about resilience, curiosity, and showing up as a whole human being in a metrics-heavy industry.

Then we switch gears into AI in pharma and medtech with a quiz based on real FDA warning letters. What goes wrong when companies submit AI-generated documents without review, or misclassify an AI diagnostic tool as “exercise equipment”? We talk AI governance, GMP expectations, regulatory paperwork, and why human-in-the-loop is not optional when patient safety is on the line.

If you care about patient safety, pharmaceutical compliance, counterfeit medicine risks, and the real-world limits of automation, this one is for you. Subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave us a review so more people can learn how to move safer from lab to lives.
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Hosts
Alexander Booth
Chiara Chianese
Ivanna Rosendal Oshida

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Support the show

________
Reach out to Ivanna Rosendal

Join the conversation on our LinkedIn page
Visit www.labtolives.com 

Hosts
Alexander Booth
Chiara Chianese
Ivanna Rosendal Oshida

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If you have ever wondered why brilliant healthcare ideas still fail to reach patients, this conversation gets uncomfortably specific, in the best way. We sit down with Chiara, a former wet-lab genomics scientist who worked in male infertility, then pivoted into an MBA, startups, and pharma strategy roles in AI and analytics. She now co-founds Orby Grants to make grant writing and grant management accessible, and she brings a rare perspective on what it actually takes to translate life sciences innovation into real-world care.

We dig into “mentech” and male reproductive health: why men’s infertility and sexual health can be treated as niche, how stigma stops people getting tested, and why the emotional load is routinely ignored. Chiara shares what it was like speaking to patients during her PhD work and how societal expectations can quietly drive worse health outcomes for everyone in a couple, not just one person.

Then we get practical about AI in healthcare, including Chiara’s early chatbot project FerdiBot, built before ChatGPT made the idea mainstream. We talk timing, funding, co-founder fit, evidence, and the brutal truth that healthcare products cannot be judged like consumer apps. Along the way, we land on our favourite metaphor of the day: the “human being room”, where scientists, investors, clinicians, and patients drop the mask and have an honest conversation about needs and constraints.

We finish with a fast GLP-1 quiz that explores effects beyond obesity, from cardiometabolic outcomes to addiction research and surprising societal changes. Subscribe for more Lab2Lives, share this with someone building in health, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.
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Reach out to Ivanna Rosendal

Join the conversation on our LinkedIn page
Visit www.labtolives.com 

Hosts
Alexander Booth
Chiara Chianese
Ivanna Rosendal Oshida

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Europe looks like one market on a map, but try bringing a drug across borders and you quickly learn it behaves like many systems at once. We sit down with Daphne Smyth, a regulatory leader based in Ireland with 35+ years in pharmaceutical regulatory affairs, to unpack a mistake we keep seeing: companies build commercial teams first, then discover they have not built the regulatory pathway needed to launch at all. The result is not just delay, it is avoidable rework in clinical plans, manufacturing set-up, and the evidence story regulators expect.

We spend a big part of the conversation on Chinese pharma and Chinese biotech moving into the EU. Daphne shares what surprises new entrants most: EU complexity, the need for the right legal structure, the reality of EMA procedures and committees, and the hard requirement that clinical data must be relevant to European patient populations, standards of care, and comparators. We also talk about ethnic sensitivity, PK/PD bridging, and why “we already developed it in China” can still mean going backwards to add studies. If Europe becomes too restrictive or simply too complicated, we risk blocking genuinely fascinating innovation.

We then zoom out to the global drug development playbook: China’s scale and integrated biotech hubs, the US venture-driven model, Europe’s regulation-led caution, and why Australia keeps showing up as a fast route for early clinical trials. Finally, we lighten things up with a quick quiz on FDA Q2 2026 approvals, including the runaway earning potential of GLP-1 obesity drugs and how much of the quarter is actually oncology.

If you enjoy practical regulatory strategy, market entry realities, and how to get medicines from lab to patients, subscribe, share the episode with a colleague, and leave us a review. What is the hardest “hidden rule” you have seen when entering a new healthcare market?
Connect with Daphne Smyth on LinkedIn.
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Reach out to Ivanna Rosendal

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Hosts
Alexander Booth
Chiara Chianese
Ivanna Rosendal Oshida

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Pharma doesn’t usually fail because the science is too hard. It stalls because humans are trying to do hard work inside a system that is overloaded, siloed and full of unwritten rules. We sit down with Isabelle, a physician with deep pharma experience who now works as a consultant, to unpack what really stops transformation and what actually helps teams move again. 

We talk about the five big value streams in a pharma company and why the friction between them becomes the real bottleneck. Isabelle explains why the “technical aspect is never the problem”, and why cross-functional delivery so often breaks on culture, incentives, role clarity and plain old nerves. We also dig into the surprising power of the “consultant hat”: the same truth can be welcomed from the outside and resisted from the inside, and that changes how leaders should use external support. 

From there we get practical: how complexity eats capacity, why organisations keep adding to the buffet without removing anything, and how “slower is faster” can be a real strategy when teams map blockers and cut low-value work. Then we play a sliding-doors biopharma quiz that brings it all to life, from big investment bets (semaglutide in obesity) to tough filing decisions, and the reminder that approval is not adoption in market access. 

If you care about organisational change in the pharmaceutical industry, pharma consulting, breaking down silos, and building systems that let people do great work, this one’s for you. Subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave a review with the biggest blocker you see in your organisation.
Want to try the Sliding Doors in Biopharma Quiz? Find it here.

Find Isabelle on her website elytraconsulting.com –and linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabelle-catherine-widmer-md/
Support the show

________
Reach out to Ivanna Rosendal

Join the conversation on our LinkedIn page
Visit www.labtolives.com 

Hosts
Alexander Booth
Chiara Chianese
Ivanna Rosendal Oshida