The Art of Scientific Communications in Clinical Research w/ Dr. Paul Wicks

John Reites interviews Dr. Paul Wicks, a neuropsychologist, expert in clinical research and consultant in digital health. They discuss Wicks' background, his journey in patient engagement, the importance of scientific communications, the role of peer-reviewed publications in building trust in research and the cultural impact of Star Wars.

Wicks shares insights on the evolution of patient communities, the impact of his TED Talks, and his current work in helping digital health companies effectively communicate their evidence and value. The conversation emphasizes the need for transparency and collaboration in clinical research to enhance patient involvement and trust. They also discuss practical tips for getting started in cliniacl research publications, the importance of community engagement, and how digital health is evolving. 

Thank you for joining Inclusion Criteria: a Clinical Research podcast hosted by me, John Reites. This is an inclusive, non-corporate podcast focused on the people and topics that matter to developing treatments for everyone. It’s my personal project intended to support you in your career, connect with industry experts and contribute to the ideas that advance clinical research.

Inclusion Criteria is the clinical research podcast exploring global clinical trials, drug development, and life‑science innovation. We cover everything clinical research to deepen your industry knowledge, further your career and help you stay current on the market responsible for the future of medicine.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

something we've got a bit notorious for is we had so many patients in some diseases that blinded trial participants were using our platform to figure out if they're in placebo or not.

SPEAKER_02: 0:09

I remember that.

SPEAKER_00: 0:10

That's where the controversy

SPEAKER_01: 0:12

came

SPEAKER_00: 0:12

in.

SPEAKER_01: 0:12

I remember getting like a few phone calls about that actually. So no, that's a, that's a blast in the past. What, what ended up happening with that? Thank you for joining inclusion criteria, a clinical research podcast hosted by me, John Reitz. This is an inclusive non-corporate podcast focused on the people and topics that matter to developing treatments for everyone. It's my personal project intended to support you in your career, connect with industry experts and contribute to the ideas that advance clinical research. Welcome to today's conversation. Dr. Wicks, good to see you today. Thanks for joining us. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00: 0:49

It's great to see you, Joel. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01: 0:51

Today, we're going to talk about scientific communications, digital health, and it's you and me. So what are we going to talk about? We're going to hit Star Wars. So I'm just forewarning everybody. If you're not a Star Wars fan, you need to just edge that out. But who's Paul Wicks and what do you do in clinical research?

SPEAKER_00: 1:09

Sure. So I'm a neuropsychologist by training. So I specialize in specific parts of the brain that go wrong or misfire when people have got neurodegenerative conditions. And when I started my training 25 years ago, back in London, I was studying ALS. So you might know that neurodegenerative, sadly, rapidly fatal condition. And my PhD was about the fact those people could also get frontotemporal dementia, so a really difficult subject. And one of the things that we would do in the clinic is clinical research and clinical trials. But I took over the running of an online community, an online forum, like a bulletin board, where members of the clinic would come and ask questions like, why is there a placebo? You know, if most people die in 18 months, why do we need a placebo? I'm surely just see if we live for 20 months or 24 months. And then you'll know. And so I became kind of a liaison between the researchers and the community. So that was really my entryway into clinical research.

SPEAKER_01: 2:04

I had to go back and look too, because we had the pleasure of getting introduced and believe it or not, the year was around 2008. So think about that, 2008. I know you look just like you looked in 2008.

SPEAKER_00: 2:14

I was about to say, but we're looking good, John.

SPEAKER_01: 2:16

I look a lot older, but that's what happens. A mutual friend of ours said, hey, John's doing this stuff over this innovative stuff and research. He's dabbling in patient communities and thinking about it. Have you met Paul from Patients Like Me?

UNKNOWN: 2:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 2:27

And I don't even know if you remember that we were in a hallway and you're like, hey, and we just sort of like just started nerding out and talking about these things. And that's how we got to meet. So tell people like, what were you doing back 13 years ago doing patient communities, engaging people at Patients Like Me?

SPEAKER_00: 2:43

Yeah, so my work in London with a couple of hundred patients grew to working for patients like me, a venture-backed startup out of Boston, founded by a family affected by ALS. A whole bunch of MIT graduates came together and built what is a mashup between a registry and an online dating website. So the concept was, you know, if I've been diagnosed with a condition like MS or Parkinson's, it'd be really useful for me to meet other people like me. And that definition of like me could be same age, same treatments. It could be, well, both military veterans, right? Or it could be we live in this particular region. So we gave them the tools to define what a patient like me was. And so combining the sort of tools like PROs that'll be familiar to people in trials and registries with the social community was really the innovation. But we did quite a few things to do with clinical trials there as well. I think we're early. But potentially quite exciting at the time.

SPEAKER_01: 3:45

I think you hit the nail on the head. I think early, right? I think there was a lot of innovation happening at that time. And you were a part of a lot of that, which was always super intriguing to me. So you were there for a long time, like 12, 13, some odd years. What was like the impetus for the shift, right? Because obviously, if you're doing something innovative like that, there's a lot you can do in clinical research, a lot of different avenues you could take. your scientific background gives you a lot of opportunity. So sort of what did you move to, but why the shift? Like what was the sort of the push to make the change in your career?

SPEAKER_00: 4:18

Sure, so I left academia in part because I saw the pace of change was so slow. So particularly the UK, which is often a little bit behind the US in terms of tech, was very slow to adopt technology. It was very conservative with this notion that the doctors know best and that, you know, you've got to go to med school for 10 or 15 years before your opinion is valuable. And I found that incompatible with the amazing array of expert knowledge and lived experience that I saw coming from people living with a condition. So it seemed like the US was a lot more democratic in listening to the voice of patients and also much keener to harness technology. So what that looked like for trials of patients like me was a couple of different things. One is we actually took all the placebo data from a couple of diseases and map them out in graphs so that if you showed up and you had ALS or Parkinson's, we would show you this is how you're doing relative to everybody else that's been in the placebo elf trials, right? So that context for an N of one coming from all the data that's being contributed by people in trials was very useful.

UNKNOWN: 5:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 5:21

Another thing we did is we helped rapidly develop patient-reported outcome questionnaires. So we helped develop and validate about 20 PROs on our platform. I think the one of which we're proudest is one called the CYBAT, which is the suicidal ideation battery. It was actually developed very rapidly on our platform and then went into the nasal spray version of ketamine, esketamine clinical trial for suicidal ideation and depression. And then something we got a bit notorious for is we had so many patients in some diseases that blinded trial participants were using our platform to figure out if they're in placebo or not.

SPEAKER_02: 5:54

I remember that.

SPEAKER_00: 5:55

That's where the controversy came in.

SPEAKER_01: 5:58

I remember getting a few phone calls about that, actually. So, no, that's a blast in the past. What ended up happening with that? Where did that resolve?

SPEAKER_00: 6:05

So a few things had happened. It really came from the basis of self-experimentation. So many people were trying to try out different therapies, off-label medications, physical therapy, you name it. But they realized that they could actually build their own tools, their own spreadsheets and say, well, I'm a blinded participant in this study, but if I start putting my outcome data my way, I could determine from the side effects I'm getting of my trial medication, whether or not I'm placebo. And there was one trial where we had about a third of everybody in the study and they were using a big spreadsheet and they were dividing themselves by who had neutropenia and who didn't. And neutropenia is not a symptom of ALS. So it was a side effect of the drug. And so they started trying to run their own t-tests, statistical analysis on the data. So it was really unprecedented, but yeah, it was viewed as kind of a big potential risk by regulators, by sponsors, by ethicists.

SPEAKER_01: 7:00

Yeah, of course. People are innovators. And they will find a way to find out what's important to them. And I think you guys experienced that so much, right? Because you were in such an engaging community of people that were struggling with a lot of things and wanted to know more about what was happening, how to treat it, and what I really liked a lot about what you were doing. So much of the writing and even the publications were about not what people are trying to solve for themselves, but truly like people altruistically coming in and saying, I know the result of this might come after I'm passed. I want to make sure I and pass this on to somebody else's family. And you saw, you remember seeing the stories of that. They were phenomenal. And I think they sort of brought the heart of what clinical resource was about, like at its core, like this altruistic way to do research for medications that some people who are in the study might not actually get a chance to take in the future.

SPEAKER_00: 7:51

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think one thing that both of us have worked on and interrogated is the social contract between researchers and trial participants and really interrogated whether or not now in the modern era, there's a conditional altruism. You know, I'm not just going to blindly take whatever information My doctor says I should take. I might say, well, I'll take part in your research study. Well, can I have accommodation? Can I have my travel covered? Are you going to set up a waiting room where my partner can sit? Who's going to look after my kids? These are all questions that if we don't address, people with busy lives aren't going to be able to take part. Or increasingly, what we've both realized is the inequality that sets up. White-collar professional, maybe you can take half a day off work, but maybe if you're a shift worker... Maybe you can't, right? So I think fixing that inequality is really needed, particularly in today's world.

SPEAKER_01: 8:41

Little known fact, you actually were one of the original like TED presenters. And I know this about you, and I know you probably don't want people to know this, but it was 2011, 2012 at the heyday of prestige, where if someone did a TED talk, you were watching that thing online. You were one of those presenters. I actually think you might've done it twice, but you did it. So there's a lot of TEDx events now, but in the past, you remember this, Paul, and you should take some credit here. There were not a lot of people speaking at TED. And when you got on that red carpet, it was a big deal. How'd that feel? What did that do for your career? Like, how did that sort of change your thinking around sharing a big idea like this?

SPEAKER_00: 9:20

Yeah, no, thank you. You're right. So yeah, 15 years ago, did you see a TED Talk was something you might say at lunch. And TEDx are these locally run events, right? So you can basically set one up. And so long as you show a couple of official TED Talks and have some speakers and set it up right, then you can kind of do that locally. So I did one locally in the Berkshires in Massachusetts for a group of health tech innovators. And it really pushed me to take a story about big data. and personalize it. So I was trying to show how the tools that we had developed could help a lay person to think like a doctor, think like a scientist. And it was through that and through the nomination of a friend of mine, Dr. Max Little, who's a TED fellow, that I actually got to present a big TED, the big scary one in Monterey, California, as it was, it's in Vancouver now. So I was one of 20 fellows selected each year in the TED fellows program to come and be trained. And it was like, you know, presentation skills for Navy SEALs. They absolutely drilled us on how to make a compelling point, how to sort of get the highs and the lows of these things, and how to make your slides come across without any text, without any bullet points, and really take that audience along with you. So it was the most exhilarating four minute presentation of my life. I spent a year, wordsmithing every word of that four minutes. But I looked around the audience and I saw billionaires and celebrities and tech founders. And it was so amazing to be able to have that impact and have that story spread on behalf of the patients, on behalf of the other innovators that I worked with.

SPEAKER_01: 10:49

Yeah, it's been an experience that will stick with me for the rest of my life. If anybody asks me, did you ever do a TED? I can officially say no, but I know somebody well who did. So you're like, you just make me look cooler at dinner table. So thanks, Dr. Wicks. I appreciate that. You know, real quick, I want to dive into some topics that I think will certainly expand some of the work you've been doing in clinical research and unpack for some of our listeners. I think some key themes that could be really helpful for them, not just sort of what's happening, but also some thoughts around a career trajectory, tactics and strategies they can employ in their career today that might be helpful and may not have been on their radar before. But before we do that, tell everybody, what are you working on now? What are you doing today? Because if someone goes to your LinkedIn, they're going to see a lot of things you're up to. So in a nutshell, what are you doing?

SPEAKER_00: 11:38

Yeah, so at the moment, I'm an independent consultant. I work for myself at a company called Wix Digital Health. And really what I focus on is working with digital health companies to help deliver outsized value and impact for their evidence, their revenue, and their awareness, and to tie those things together really through a lot of work that I call SCICOM. So both the side of which studies, what data do we have, what evidence do we want to deliver? And then once we've done that work, how do we communicate it? Because so often we wait till the study's done and we're like, great, we've done the study. But we don't kind of use every part of the buffalo. We don't take the stake over the main data and turn it into a regulatory submission. We don't take the, you know, the Chuck beef tacos that could turn into infographics for LinkedIn, right? We just tend to assume it's out there. So what I really work with is trying to string that all together. And yeah, tell stories that could go to different stakeholders, whether that's regulators, people that might be paying at scale, patients, and then your own users. Your own users want to know they're using an innovative product that's been proven to help them and understand how the improvements are going. So yeah, it's a fascinating job. I get to work with a great diversity of companies and yeah, that variety really keeps me alight.

SPEAKER_01: 12:43

I think SciComm, besides sounding like a gamer tag on Xbox, I think one of my kids actually has a name. Sounds very close to that. When I think about scientific communications and I think about that as a practice, as something that somebody does, as an important skill that you need to have in clinical research, Paul, you obviously come to mind. You're the, and I'm going to use this, you are the Jedi Knight of this work. And I give you a lot of credit for it. But you kind of unpacked a little bit of it. For someone who's like, I have never, I've been in clinical research. I've never heard the word PSYCOMs or scientific communications. In a nutshell, what does that mean?

SPEAKER_00: 13:17

So in true note, fashion, my most frequently used quote is Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So if you're a digital health innovator, and you've made an app that's like CBT for young people with depression, or an AI that can tell you whether or not you need to go to the doctor, that's an extraordinary claim. People have to train for 20 years to do either of those things, right? So if you're saying I made an app, you're gonna have to prove that that it does what it says on the 10, that it's safe, and reasonable people are going to have questions. Like if, you know, John and I both fill out the same questions at the same time, do we get the same answers? Do we get the same answers at a different time of day or when the server's busy? You know, who's deciding who pulls those levers? So a lot of it is kind of explaining how things work, right? Sort of proving your methods, showing your methods, but also providing some reassurance and some explanation, right? The other thing I found it does is it tends to keep people honest, right? So many startups are held together by tape. You know, there's often this concept of like designing the plane whilst you're flying it, whilst you're building it. And actually writing down, this is how it works. This is version one is very useful in crystallizing, moving from the duct tape stage to the spreadsheet stage, to the SOP, to the quality management system. There are steps along the way. And I think generating peer reviewed evidence, especially helps consolidate each of those steps along the way.

SPEAKER_01: 14:39

Yeah, makes sense. Dig into that a little bit too, because I think when there's some listeners we have that are probably really well experienced, have a lot of education background, have co-authored a series of publications. There's a number of other people, and I run into them all the time in clinical research, and they've never really had a chance to contribute to a publication previously. or a peer-reviewed publication or go through that process. And I think it's a really rewarding process because it's challenging, right? It's a different level of thinking. And so when you unpack publications, especially peer-reviewed publications, why are they so important to some people? And then some people don't seem to understand they even exist.

SPEAKER_00: 15:17

So I think the peer-reviewed literature grew out of a couple of different observations. And one is that When we do our own science, we tend to do these little tweaks and we tend to give ourselves these little allowances and exceptions that mean we can believe our own biases. We believe our own hype. And really, science only stands if I give you the recipe and someone on the other side of the world can follow it and get pretty much the same results. And so where peer-reviewed science grew from is when someone makes an observation about a frog or a butterfly or a flower or something like that. It should be relatively universal. because if you're the only person that can find it then you're some kind of magician or you're deluding yourself right so the point is to contribute to a body of knowledge that we can all benefit from even when the one person who it always works for isn't in the room you know bending spoons then then i think we've contributed to something so the challenge though is it is a slow process right it's a slow painstaking process it has a lot of rules, regulations, traditions. And it can take a lot if your primary work is on product development or marketing. then that can be very challenging. If you're working in more traditional pharmaceutical sponsors, there's a ton of process that has to go into that. You can't just write the thing. It has to be vetted by 40 or 50 people. So it's a big undertaking. But I think the benefits are generally legitimacy and engaging with the community. So if you're going to be engaging with clinicians, they're going to want to interrogate the methods. They want to see that you're being a good actor in the system, right? So... there are plenty of examples. I've come across everything from stem cell transplants to, you know, Theranos, you know, where they wouldn't show they're working. And so increasingly now that has raised the bar where you have to show your methods. It has to be replicable and it can't all just be proprietary. It can't be in a black box because otherwise you don't have trust. So on some level, It's about trust and creating an environment where you can show that your ideas are so strong that they stand by themselves and that people should commit to trying your drug or trying your product or deploying it. And increasingly, I think what we're seeing is a tiered approach. So particularly in digital health, what you see from people like the Digital Medicine Society is say, well, if you have a small amount of evidence, let's do a pilot. We're not going to give this to 10,000 people. until we have, say, two pivotal RCTs that prove that it works. And yeah, that's kind of the standard that you see for drugs as well, clearly. And yeah, we're very sensitive to the notion that there's conflicts of interest, for example. You know, if I make the drug or if I own IP or if I own a patent on it, I'm very motivated to say how brilliant it is or to say, well, this trial failed the primary outcome, but if you squint and I really do a post-hoc analysis, then actually it turns out to be brilliant. Okay, but ideally... your peer review publication would have published a protocol about a year in advance. So we can test whether or not what you said you'd do is the same as what you actually did. So it's all kind of methods and processes that allow us to be more certain of the claims that people make in medicine and beyond.

SPEAKER_01: 18:22

I think this trust piece is really important, right? Because the, you know, science is hard enough, right? Being able to go through, build something, replicate it, and then have other people look at your data and interrogate it in a very kind of iron sharpens iron way. Make sure that what you're saying, like you said, is repeatable and enforceable. I think that trust is so key. And it's why I actually would encourage people, if you're in clinical research and you're thinking about something else to do to expand your CV, expand your career, one of the best areas. And actually one of the things that sort of helped me a lot was getting involved with smarter people that are doing publications and getting involved in contributing as a co-author to those. I'll never forget, Paul, like I had friends of ours, Dr. Amir Kalali, Elisa Cascade, like the two of them were actually in a meeting and Amir gets a lot of credit for this. He said, hey, John, you need to do publications. And I literally was like, what's a publication? I didn't know. It was back in like 2002, 2003 era. And he said, well, come on and we're going to teach you. I got to do a lot of legwork, which was really helpful, right? And you should. But I got to sort of get an early sense of that process. And for me, the coolest part was, you know, you do this work and then you wait like a year. You never hear anything. And then boom, it's published and you saw your name. I mean, I was like number six on there, but it was like, wow, we did that. Like we proved something meaningful. And I got to tell you that for me, So I love what you're saying. I'd encourage anybody to really do that. If somebody is in pharma, someone's in a CRO, a supplier company, and they want to do something with a publication, what's an easy way they can start? What's something they could do that's maybe not trying to get the BMJ to publish my life's work? What's something they could do that would get them into this mode and just start doing something in publications?

UNKNOWN: 20:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 20:06

So I think you're right. It can be daunting. I think a great place to start is letters to the editor, right? If someone's written something and you have something to contribute, generally editors are very keen to have that dialogue in their journals. Be nice. It's not your opportunity to like throw shade on folks, but to come with your ideas and say, you know, have the authors considered this other point or, hey, this reminds me of something from another field that you may not have considered, right? So it's an opportunity to be helpful and useful. I think the other potential is sort of opinion pieces, you know, so even if you don't have a ton of data, if you have synthesized a whole bunch of stuff that's going on in the field and you have a particular view that you want to advance, then I think, again, publishers, editors are very interested in that. But you're right, the best way is to sort of collaborate with other people that have done it before. There are these authorship guidelines called ICMJE that basically state how much work you have to do to be an author on a paper. So in the bad old days, it would be everyone in the department gets to be on the paper or whoever's paying the bills gets to be on the paper or whatever. And now increasingly what we do is we say, well, everyone has to make an intellectual contribution, right? So that means that when the paper goes out, Each of you, whether six authors or 20, are intellectually responsible for the content. And you know, if it makes a point, you should be able to defend it. So that means that you as a group have got some consensus on a point. Yeah, again, talking about this crystallizing what we really think. Writing it down really helps with that. For me personally, I'm often the person that writes the title. Most people read the title, a few people read the abstract, and then a very small number of people will read the whole paper and go through the references. So if you can grab people's attention with the main point of your title, or just get your narrative talking points across in the abstract, that goes a long way to it. So you could bring different skills, whether that's writing, statistical analysis, maybe even just the project manager, who makes sure all the signatures come to life, but you're contributing intellectually. There's a whole bunch of different roles that you can play.

SPEAKER_01: 21:58

One of the ones I really like is posters, right? So if you go to a conference, we've done some, we did some together actually a long time ago. You'd go to a poster and essentially in a poster, there's a conference, they are accepting applications. You create your poster, you do your research, you show your graphs, you show your objectives and what your results were. You submit that and it's sort of a really important but lighter workload to a full peer-reviewed publication, way to get in and present what you've been working on. I did publish personally, I know you have too, a a lot of posters because it was really good practice, but it was also a way to get a simple idea that wasn't as complex out the door and to really engage the community with that. And so, yeah, I think it's great.

SPEAKER_00: 22:38

No, I think it's great. I've just been doing some coaching and mentoring actually with an up-and-coming scientist at one of my clients. They just presented at a conference and used a lot of the tips and tricks that I've accumulated over the years. For example, you know, having handouts of your poster because you might meet people in a corridor and not at the poster session. You want to give it to them. Having QR codes, having a call to action, but also engaging in social media, right? So LinkedIn hashtags are increasingly becoming useful. So if someone's attending a meeting, you know, the algorithm seems to know this and sort of shows you posters and content from other people. But one thing people sleep on a lot is not uploading the poster to somewhere like ResearchGate or Figshare so that after the conference is over, that PDF is kind of there forever. So, you know, I think there are lots of things you can do to extend the shelf life of those types of things and get a lot more value out of them for sure.

SPEAKER_01: 23:25

I think one of the tips for me is you and I are co-authors on a work, but one of them we did was with the Nature, the MPJ article. That was so fun to do, the co-authors on that. Just being able to meet and talk about these topics, review our data was awesome. I'll never forget it. It's almost two years old. On a weekly basis, I have a Google tracker. I get a hit that says it's been referenced, right? And I go look at the attribution and I'm like, oh, and that actually helps me kind of dig into it. Somebody is also on this idea or someone's also curious about inclusion in research or someone's also... really passionate about decentralizing a study and being very measured about the pros and cons. I found the best publications because people attribute that publication, funny enough. So for what it's worth, I think you can go into Google Scholar, you can track that. It's a super powerful tool. I get a lot of my reading from that because you're right. People don't go on LinkedIn and post, here's this publication just read, you should check it out. And I hope people do that more. But in the interim, That's the solution that's been working for me.

SPEAKER_00: 24:21

Yeah,

SPEAKER_01: 24:21

no, I think

SPEAKER_00: 24:22

it's a great way to find your people, find your tribe, right?

SPEAKER_01: 24:24

It is. Yeah, it is. And I mean, shifting gears a little bit, the expert area that I want our audience to think about with you is scientific communications, like all that embodies so much of the good work you've done and so much you move forward. The digital health angle, though, equally is important because obviously you've been in there since the early days. You understand the model and you've been a big proponent of how to Make digital health very normal, make it the standard. So like, tell us, when does the word digital come out? When is just everything we talk about digital health become health? Is that any closer? We used to say this like 10 years ago. And I still see digital health like the index on that word. So is this more of the standard? Is it becoming normal? Is that word going to get dropped at some point?

SPEAKER_00: 25:05

I think we're still pretty far away. I think there was a big hype bubble during COVID, especially, right, where we thought that everything would be entirely sort of app-based or digital. When we sort of returned to the physical world, we saw that snap back. But one of the challenges was we didn't see the payment pathways being put in. So, for example, there's a great app if you have insomnia called Sleepio, and it is approved by NICE in the NHS in England, which means it's supposed to be reimbursed and freely available. But no one will pay for it. in the NHS. And so you can't get this app that works, that is evidence-based, that has 20 years of trials. And so what that means is if you go to the doctor and you say you've got insomnia, if they haven't heard of the digital tool, they'll probably give you sleeping tablets. And those could be habit forming and those can have side effects, right? So I do think we still have a ways to go. It's just that the transformation is taking longer than we expect. But the benefit would be once it is there, that's the new normal, right? That's the new standard. So unfortunately, it's taking longer than we think. But I think it'll be once it's installed, it'll be a lot more permanent, a lot more consistent rather than previous systems.

SPEAKER_01: 26:10

It's a measured response. It's fair. I hope you're wrong. I hope it goes faster. I would love

SPEAKER_00: 26:15

to wake up tomorrow and all the fax machines in the NHS have been destroyed and you go to the doctor and they don't give you the clipboard with the same questions like, are you still male? How much do you weigh? Is there any chance you could be pregnant? And you're like, come on, guys. You have my full body MRI scan. You have my genome. You have my electronic medical records from 20 insurers. Why are we doing this? You still want to know my middle name? What's going on? We can do better.

SPEAKER_01: 26:35

This is called doing the hard work. That's what we do every day, right? We're going to move this thing. It's just going to take time. Absolutely. Persistence is what wins in our industry. If you're in clinical research, and I hope you're hearing that from Paul, persistence is the word you should just make on your shirt.

SPEAKER_00: 26:52

The slow boring of hard boards is how I've heard it described.

SPEAKER_01: 26:57

Before we move on from the digital health point, when you think about digital health and scientific communications, we sort of heard everything you talked about in science communications and the importance and value of that. But if I'm in a digital health company or I'm trying to get something around digital health moved forward, How's the intersection of SciComm help my digital health move forward? How should I at a digital health company be thinking about SciComm to actually research better or publish my evidence better?

SPEAKER_00: 27:25

Yeah, no, that's a great question. So what I always recommend people do is benchmark where they are right now relative to their competitors for their age and stage. So if you just started yesterday, it's fine that you don't have a paper in the Lancet. But if you've been going for 20 years and you've got five doctors and you haven't published anything, that looks a little suspect, right? So it's about appropriately calibrating that. You said earlier about conferences. I think abstracts are a great way of crystallizing and getting you to be concise, right? If you have to run a 300-word abstract, guess what? You're not going to fit in the whole kitchen sink. You've got to stick to the main points. And then, yeah, I think there's a mixed diet of editorials, opinion pieces, primary data pieces, and then re-analysis of your data. Because often if you've got thousands of patients with a condition, just the data that you're collecting routinely is probably one of the richest data sources out there. So either work on that with your own data science teams or partner with other academics who'd be really keen to analyze that data. And yeah, you're essentially leaving breadcrumbs that says, we show our methods, we do our work in the public spotlight, and we engage with the community.

SPEAKER_01: 28:23

So expert area, SciComm? Second expert area, digital health. Third expert area, Star Wars. Yes. Can I just ask, and again, this is where everybody just stops listening and watching and moves on with their career, and we just keep talking, but in all seriousness... What is it about Star Wars that we love it so much and we can not have talked to each other for six months, get on the phone and start nerding out about Star Wars? What is it?

SPEAKER_00: 28:49

So I know for me, it's very personal. Some of my earliest memories are going around a supermarket and there being a toy section. And I didn't want to go around the supermarket with my mom. And I'd be like, can I go look at the toys and just sit there looking at like Jabba's Palace and, you know, AT-ATs and whatever. But also when I was a kid, I lived in Switzerland for a few years and I didn't speak French. So the TV made no sense. And all I had was these videotapes. And so, you know, the original trilogy were like in the VCR all the time. And so, you know, I had the toys and I had the movies and stuff. And so it was just big presence in my life. And I think what's been interesting is I feel like liking Star Wars was a relatively unusual niche thing about, you know, when I was a kid. I would play the video games, the computer games, X-Wing, especially these simulators where, you know, you were kind of managing the shields and all this kind of stuff were really great. And then sometime around the late 90s, early 2000s, suddenly everyone was into Star Wars, right? There's like Darth Vader breakdancing and Yoda t-shirts and stuff. And I'm like, well, this is cool because there's more stuff, there's more content. But there's also a little bit of like, huh, now it's kind of ubiquitous. Maybe it doesn't feel as special anymore, right? And yeah, so it's gone through different evolutions for me. But, you know, you can see I'm old school, right? Just the bits and pieces here of, you know, the Millennium Falcon. And I've got a TIE bomber over here. I've got, you can't see it. This is Darth Vader taking his at-at for a walk is my bookshelf. And of course, I've just enjoyed Andor, which has been a tremendous experience and, you know, restored my faith in the Force.

SPEAKER_01: 30:18

Yeah, no spoilers here. No spoilers. No spoilers here if you're watching. Yeah, it's funny. I kind of think it's a lot like a MacBook. Do you remember? I don't know if you did this too. I got a MacBook like really early on and I would walk into the office and there'd be a bunch of PCs and people like, what are you doing? And I kind of felt like I was in the special cool nerd club of nerds that liked tech and kind of a Mac kind of got me. Like I was just really, for me, it was really like business and art together. Yes.

UNKNOWN: 30:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 30:46

Yeah, still have mine. Like my original one with all my goofy stickers is still in there. And then fast forward now, I was actually out and somebody, I said, well, are you going to get a Mac or PC? And they looked at me like, I'm getting a Mac. Almost like, why would I get a PC? And that, when you said that, that's kind of the inflection point for me. But listen, Star Wars for me was the same. It was Return of the Jedi. Big deal in my house. I swear. I think I had every speeder bike I could get my hands on or build with a Lego set. And for me, it was, this is what we watched, right? And VHSs, and I watched this with my family, and TV wasn't as cool back then. This is what we did. And just... Again, for you only, Paul. And it's so funny because I didn't set you up or pay you money to talk about VHSs, but something to show you. So I don't know if you can see this. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So one of the things I did during COVID was super nerdy, was doing collectibles that are graded. And one of the things I found was old sealed VHSs in like pristine condition, but like the original, original version. And I don't want to go all into it, but there's ways to figure out that this was like a first or second edition ever printed. So I have some of those. And so this is the original Star Wars VHS. Right. Things like this where, talking about sci-coms, right, where you're talking about how do I publish and tell people about my work so they'll be connected and understand me and talk to me. Star Wars was like the door opener, right? It was where all the people that kind of were in the clubs that I wanted to be a part of and wanted to recognize me really opened up. So I think that was what was impactful for me.

SPEAKER_00: 32:21

Absolutely. I mean, I've had a couple of Points in my career where it's came back. So I've been working in ALS for 22 years, as you know. So ALS, terrible disease, 18 months survival. I have tracked the data of or interacted with or participated with about 12,000 humans who have died as a result of ALS. And particularly when I was training and particularly when I was working so hard every day, in my head, it was like the Rebel Alliance versus the Death Star, right? I see these populations. I would get an email every week of who's died. drip, drip, drip, drip, drip of this. And it was incredibly difficult. And it was one of the ways that I kept that fire going within me of going like, I'm going to spend the next 20 years and I might make a screw on the, you know, photon torpedo that becomes the thing that goes down the trench. We're like, there are no heroes in research as such, right? We're all just making little screws and bolts and things on it. But that was a useful frame. So that was one aspect to it. And then I think another aspect that came through was just, you know, appreciating great art, like appreciating the great shows that have been recently in different riffs on it has been really great. So it's something that I can share with my children. They love it. And yeah, it's really fun.

SPEAKER_01: 33:32

Paul, if someone wants to connect with you, they want to dig in on science comms. They just want to be connected with you. They have some work they want to give you. How do they get ahold of you?

UNKNOWN: 33:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 33:40

Best way to find me is on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is like my operating system at this point. So it's just Paul Wicks and look for this guy. And yeah, I'd love to talk to you.

SPEAKER_01: 33:48

And if you watch his TED Talk and you comment on there that he looks exactly the same as he does right now, you get a bonus point.