Our Team
Benedikt von Thüngen
I’m the CEO and Founder of Sanome, thanks for stopping by.
My academic background is in biosciences, however, my passion is building and scaling companies. I started my entrepreneurial journey during my undergraduate degree and have since built multiple companies across renewable energy, enterprise software, AI, drug discovery, and healthcare.
My long-term vision is to build a human digital twin (read more here) that allows us to predict any changes to someone’s health before they actually occur. Early detection of disease will truly transform healthcare and that’s why I started Sanome.
Paul Aykroyd
As co-founder and COO at Sanome, my priority is to support the business as it grows into a robust, well-balanced team, while simultaneously establishing a strong culture centred on trust, empowerment, transparency and continuous improvement.
I believe it’s key to place user and employee satisfaction at the centre of all business decisions.
My vision for Sanome is to use my decades of experience as a leader in the tech World - for good.
We have achieved unthinkable milestones at Sanome this year and I am looking forward to continuing this incredible growth and deliver products that make a difference to the world.
Dr Andrew Creagh - BA, BAI, MAI, MA (Oxon.), D.Phil (Oxon.)
I am the lead AI/ML Scientist at Sanome. I am also concurrently a visiting researcher in Digital Health & AI/ML at the Computational Health Informatics (CHI) laboratory at the University of Oxford.
I'm leading the development of our multimodal AI-powered early warning systems (EWS) for early detection of clinical events.
I'm super excited to be working with Sanome and our clinical partners to help shift the needle towards truly personalised and preventative healthcare.
Eddie Pease - BA, MA (Oxon), MSc
I’m the Engineering Lead at Sanome.
I am responsible for the engineering function at Sanome. I work with our hospital partners to help them clean and rationalise their data, deploy our co-designed clinical tools that the data scientists develop and ensure that our infrastructure is robust and secure.
I think that the technology that we are developing here at Sanome is urgently needed, in the UK and worldwide, to enable a shift to a more preventative healthcare system at time when healthcare systems globally are struggling with increased demand.
Anastassia Rowe
I'm part of the commercial team at Sanome. I work directly with Benedikt to ensure that the solutions we're developing have a real economic impact for healthcare systems. I also help bridge the gap between patients, clinicians and innovators, ensuring that our co-designed healthcare tools align with the diversity of needs and improve care quality for all.
I'm really excited about working at Sanome as it allows me to help develop technologies that not only have the potential to save lives but also significantly enhance the efficiency of the NHS.
Anna Boden
I’m part of the operations team at Sanome, helping with the smooth day-to-day running of the business.
I thoroughly enjoy working with such enthusiastic visionaries and I really believe that the product we are creating here at Sanome will change the course of healthcare.
Tom Pease - BA, MA (Oxon), MA
I am part of the Data Science team at Sanome.
I’m working on Early Warning Systems; modelling patient data to pick up clinical events before clinicians can.
It’s a privilege to be in a role that allows me feel like I’m working on something that will improve people's lives. Added to that, Sanome is a great place to work - everyone gets on really well and it’s exciting to be working at the cutting edge of Clinical AI.
Richard Silk - BA, MA (Cantab)
I’m part of the Engineering team at Sanome. I joined Sanome having previously worked alongside Benedikt and Paul at Speechmatics.
I work with Big Data, standardising records from disparate hospital IT systems, identifying useful features. Robustness and data security are my top priorities.
Working at Sanome is incredibly rewarding. Through smart application of technology, we have the potential to save lives and dramatically improve the efficiency of the NHS.
Dr Will Waldock
After reading Medicine at Cambridge, and selection to be an NHS Clinical Entrepreneur, Aspen UK Rising Leaders Fellowship Ambassador, a BiteLabs Health Technology Fellow and Specialist Foundation Doctor in Academic Surgery and Innovation, William serves as Sanome’s Clinical Associate and is particularly enthusiastic about the opportunities of pre-emptive health. William has been recognised with research funding from the Royal College of Surgeons, presented and published internationally, and seeks to apply biological sciences and digital technology to preventative healthcare.
The Advisory Board
Clinical Advisors
Dr. Benjamin Viaris de Lesegno
I am a clinical and academic doctor, a humanitarian practitioner and a Healthtech entrepreneur.
I have been an NHS consultant since 2016. I trained in France where I practiced Obstetrics and Gynaecology. I also have an MSc in Genetics and participated in research and teaching in my daily life. I have been on several humanitarian missions and have worked in places as different as the slums of India, Syrian refugee camps at the beginning of the war, the Jungle of Calais with migrant population from Africa, the Middle East or South east Asia. As an entrepreneur, I am the co-founder and former CMO of Leva Clinic, the first digital chronic pain clinic in the UK. I was also the Healthtech chapter lead at la French Tech and a fellow of the NHS Clinical Entrepreneurship Program
Dr. Amira Bhaiji
Dr Bhaiji is currently practicing at Chelsea and Westminster Hospitals. She is conducting academic research in Cardiovascular Medicine. Alongside this, Amira is a clinical tutor associated with the University of Oxford. Amira has supported Sanome’s clinical research identifying biomarkers connected to preventable hospital acquired complications, as we develop an in-hospital integrated tool for clinicians and patients.
Dorothy Bean RN
I am a registered adult and children’s nurse, and health visitor.
I have worked in specialist practice and senior management in the NHS and private sectors as well as in Higher Education where I taught cancer and palliative care studies and research methods. Teaching research studies fuelled my interest in data, followed by my involvement in informatics and more latterly with startups.
My interest in Sanome is driven by the benefits it can bring to patients and to nursing by smarter uses of data. This is all driven by a desire to make a material difference to people’s lives.
NHS Advisor
Liam Cahill
I am an advisor to national and arms length bodies, frontline providers, charities, social care, venture builders and a number of healthtech companies. I am passionate about bringing together progressive health that makes the best possible use of digital in the future health system.
Regulatory Advisor
Professor Carole Longson MBE
I’m a former Executive Director at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) from 2000-2018 and Chief Scientific Officer at the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) from 2018-2020. I’m now Honorary Professor for Health Technology Assessment at Manchester University and an independent adviser working with a variety of public and private sector organizations in the UK and abroad on health technology assessment, market access and life science policy.
Scientific Advisors
Professor Chris Lowe OBE
I am Professor Emeritus of Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge and have built multiple spin-out companies. My principal research interests cover areas of healthcare biotechnology including biopharmaceuticals, diagnostics and sensors, ageing and medical microbiology. Changing the diagnostics development paradigm through multimodal combination biomarkers is the way forward.
Haitham Bou Ammar
As a technical expert in Bayesian optimisation and extensive experience in machine learning, I am delighted to be supporting Sanome's development. I currently lead the reinforcement learning team at Huawei R&D UK.
I am an honorary Assistant Professor at University College London. Prior to this, I have led research at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania.
My research interests are broad; covering topics in statistical machine learning, Bayesian modelling with and without deep learners, reinforcement learning, multi-agent systems, distributed optimisation and non-convex optimisation.
I am fascinated in the application of AI to medicine, including problems of efficiently and autonomously designing antibodies and modelling human behaviour, and look forward to Sanome's continued discovery, growth and implementation to change healthcare.
Dr. Sebastien Spiegler
My Ph.D. is in Machine Learning & Natural Language Processing.
This followed my first degree in Business Informatics.
Commercial Advisors
Eckhardt Weber
I am Managing Partner at Heal Capital, where we invest into companies that develop technologies to redefine healthcare. Sanome is transforming diagnostic innovation the same way other companies have revolutionized drug discovery with AI. It’s super exciting.
Alasdair Thong
I am Managing Partner at Selvedge Venture and Venture Partner at Mubadala. My passion is the interface of technology and biology and work with multiple companies that seek to disrupt healthcare. Benedikt & I started dreaming about how to rewrite healthcare nearly ten years ago and I am super excited to make this dream a reality.
Dr. Cem Baydar
I am chief consulting officer at Evaluate Pharma and over the past 20 years have worked with Top (bio)pharma and investors on commercial strategy, M&A and portfolio management for the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. I also invest and advise prominent healthcare start-ups, VCs and health-tech accelerators.
Thomas Kousholt
I have built and scaled product and service-centric companies before, ranging from deep tech to healthcare solutions. My focus is ensuring that the team has crystal clear product requirements to deliver commercial value to the healthcare market. Paul, Benedikt and I have worked together before and it is great to be working with them again.
Investors
