Meet the Team: Dr. Will Briggs.

?? Meet our Founder: Will Briggs ??

?Kicking off our “Meet the Team” series, we sat down with our Founder and CEO, Dr. Will Briggs,?to find out a bit more about him and what a PhD in metabolomics has to do with his greatest sporting moment.

?So grab a coffee and take a read:

??? What is your professional background?

"Academically, I trained as a doctor on the MD PhD program at Cambridge University. I did my PhD in a field of biochemistry called metabolomics, which was intellectually fascinating and sparked an interest in big data. But I must admit, one of the big advantages of extending my time at university was that it gave me another opportunity to beat Oxford in the rugby Varsity Match! I’d played in five successive losses, including one as Captain. Thankfully, my last two Varsity Matches went our way!??

After my PhD, I returned to finish off the final part of my medical education and then?went to work at Chelsea & Westminster NHS Trust as a Junior Doctor. The hospital was incredible, the staff were amazing, and the patients were inspiring. But something had changed in me. The PhD had given me the freedom to think creatively,?find and solve problems, and follow my curiosity which I enjoyed a lot. I also became fascinated with the idea of having an impact at scale. As a Junior Doctor, you're not really given the space to pursue that side of things. So, I made the difficult decision to leave medicine and pursue my entrepreneurial interests."?

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?? What were the early days of?Naitive?like for you??

"A fairly typical Founder journey: I lived on peanuts for about 15 months whilst we tried to get the company off the ground and raise our first venture capital funding, which we did in May 2021. Obviously, that meant we were fund-raising during COVID, which was a very uncertain time. I’d just left a very stable career, and I had family members calling me up to say that they thought I should go back to medicine. But, I just felt that there was something in this that was really worth pursuing.”

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?? Why did you start?Naitive??

“I really like healthcare as a field, that's why I was attracted to medicine. I love the impact that improved health has on people's lives. In particular, the ability to transform?people’s?lives at scale using technology and taking a population health approach, is fascinating to me. Through that, you're not just improving the lives of the people on a ward or that you see in a clinic, you're potentially having an impact on thousands of people at once. That's cool.?

?I remember being on the ward, gathered around a Computer on Wheels (COW) with my colleagues, looking at an X-ray. In addition to the main finding, the X-ray also showed that the patient had significant calcifications in their blood vessels, which looked like train tracks criss-crossing the image. Now, this finding wasn’t reported on the radiology report, and we, as secondary care providers, didn't act on it. Our job was to treat the acute problem that the patient had come into hospital for and get the patient well enough to go home. However, this finding could be indicative of atherosclerosis and diabetes - useful information for the primary care provider, but of course, the primary care provider would never know about it if that information wasn’t captured somewhere. This realisation got me thinking about all the useful information locked away in healthcare data siloes that could be relevant to population health management and make a big difference.?

So, we took that concept and triangulated it based on our expertise, the size of the unsolved problem, and the technical feasibility of a solution. That’s how we arrived at musculoskeletal care and, more specifically, osteoporosis.

Osteoporotic fractures are a massive health challenge: They cost over ￡3.5bn per year in the UK and $57bn per year in the US; they’re associated with significant morbidity and mortality - 12-month mortality after a hip fracture is somewhere between 20-30%, which is worse than a lot of cancers; and yet most people who have osteoporosis don’t know they’ve got it. It’s a massive unsolved?diagnostic challenge. However, the signal for Osteoporosis, the change in bone mass and microarchitecture, is hidden in X-rays. So, we asked ourselves, can we extract the salient information from X-rays, using machine learning and imaging physics, and can we close the case-finding gap?”

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??What's been the most surprising thing about setting up a?medtech?company??

"One of the things we’ve done at Naitive is hire a lot of young, smart people, and given them a lot of responsibility. It’s been fantastic to see how a lack of experience can be made up for with hard work, supportive colleagues, and a big brain(!). That being said, it’s still been a bit of a surprise seeing just how well these freshly minted grads have performed.”?

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????What advice would you give to your younger, pre-Naitive?self??

“Surround yourself with good people and good advisors.?I was very lucky to do this, but I didn’t do it by design!?I’ve now seen the impact that good advisors can have. In any start-up, there are times where it feels like the wheels are coming off. Having people you can lean on for good advice is so important.?Looking back, I'd tell myself to "do it by design". Get those advisors in early.?They don't have to be the biggest names in the field, but find?people who you can really rely on to give you sage advice.”

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???? What do the next 2 years look like for?Naitive??

"The three core activities for us now are: regulatory clearance, commercial traction, and market access.?We're very fortunate that we received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation, and there are potential avenues like CMS’s Transitional Coverage for Emerging Technologies (TCET) program, that are likely to expedite our path to adoption.?

?A key focus for me personally is building out our US team. This probably means a relocation to the US, which I’m excited about."

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Stay tuned for our next "Meet the Team"?post where we’ll be sitting down?with Dr. Chris Tromans, our Chief Technical Officer.

?#MeettheFounder #MeettheTeam #Leadership?