Why subscribe?
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives.
I am the CEO of ElmediX, a Belgian MedTech company developing whole-body hyperthermia for metastatic pancreatic cancer. We have completed our first-in-human safety trial (MATTERS) and are setting up the pivotal randomized controlled trial.
Alongside that, I am a histopathologist. Twenty-eight years at the microscope, full professor of histopathology and cytopathology at the University of Antwerp and pathologist at AML (Sonic HealthCare) in Antwerp. I love working with PhD students in Belgium, Kenya, and South Africa; two of my African mentees now run their own research groups.
The Long Look is where the things from both seats go that do not fit in an investor deck, a peer-reviewed paper, or a signed-out pathology report — what running a MedTech company as a clinician-scientist actually looks like, what 28 years at the microscope have taught me about medicine, and what two decades of cervical-cancer screening in sub-Saharan Africa have taught me about how research collaborations should work.
What you will read here
Four threads, roughly 70% of posts.
Operating a MedTech startup as an academic. Concrete observations from MATTERS-2 — investigator recruitment, family-office fundraising, what a pivotal trial actually demands from a small team. Where my financial interest sits, I say so.
Pathology, for colleagues and for patients. Cytology, histology, HPV biology, occasional dermatopathology. About once a month, a constructed biopsy or smear report, translated line by line, for patients and their families. No real patient data; never medical advice.
AI tools as a working researcher uses them. Honest, vendor-neutral, from daily use. I pay for the tools I review, unless I disclose otherwise.
Mentoring, and research from the global south. PhD supervision in Belgium, Kenya, and South Africa. Cervical-screening implementation in the Lake Victoria basin. What it means to make yourself unnecessary.
A culture-and-reading rim runs across this — books, classical music, history of the long nineteenth and twentieth century. About three posts in ten.
One post a week, in English.
Disclosure
I am CEO and shareholder of ElmediX NV. Any post that touches whole-body hyperthermia, pancreatic cancer, or the MATTERS programme will say so explicitly. I am not impartial about that work; I will state where my interest lies and what I think anyway.
Patient-facing pathology posts are educational. They are not medical advice and do not refer to any real patient. If you have received a pathology report and have questions, speak to your treating physician.
Short biography
CEO of ElmediX since 2018 (Chief Medical Officer from 2015 to 2018). MD, University of Antwerp (1990, magna cum laude). PhD in immunohistochemistry, University of Antwerp (1996). Certified pathologist since 1998. Master in Public Health, University of Liverpool (2013, distinction). Full professor at the University of Antwerp since 2023; guest professor at the University of Ghent since 2010; scientific advisor at Sefako Makgatho University, Pretoria, since 2017. About 194 peer-reviewed papers and twenty PhD theses supervised so far. Board memberships: ElmediX NV, the More Foundation, the Ark Angel Activator Fund.
— John-Paul
