SEMINARS 2026
Join vibrant discussions at Consilium Seminars: every other Thursday at 5pm London time
All our public seminars are available on our YouTube channel
SEMINARS 2026
Ambulance Taxis: The Impact of Regulation and Litigation on Health Care Fraud
February 12, 2026, 5pm London UK time
This talk is about the effectiveness of pay-and-chase lawsuits and upfront regulations for combating health care fraud. Between 2003 and 2017, Medicare spent $7.7 billion on 37.5 million regularly scheduled ambulance rides for patients traveling to and from dialysis facilities even though many did not satisfy Medicare’s criteria for receiving reimbursements. Using an identification strategy based on the staggered timing of regulations and lawsuits across the US, we find that adding a prior authorization requirement for ambulance reimbursements reduced spending much more than pursuing criminal and civil litigation did on their own. No evidence was found that prior authorization affected patients’ health.
From Patient Experience to Evidence: Human-Centered Design in Women’s Health AI
February 26, 2026 5pm London UK time
Umbereen S. Nehal, MD, MPH, MBA
Women’s health provides a practical case for examining how lived experience is incorporated into care pathways, platform design, and emerging AI-enabled tools.
In this seminar, Dr. Umbereen Nehal presents HER Heard as a use case for how community-based platforms can organize patient experience to support care navigation, service discovery, and decision-making. Drawing on clinician co-creation work, qualitative analyses of patient discourse, and ongoing platform development, the talk examines how lived experience can be structured for use in care and platform workflows without overstating evidentiary claims.
The session also discusses how agentic AI is being explored within women’s health platforms to support navigation and sensemaking, and how clinician participation in design informs the role these systems play. Using women’s health as a case, the talk highlights considerations for platform design, evidence translation, and the integration of AI into healthcare settings.
Emerging Ethical Challenges in Global Health Research
March 12, 2026 5pm London UK
For the short description, you may write: 'Research involving human participants, data and samples is vital to advance global health, toward universal health coverage, but it comes with complex ethical challenges. By showcasing recent research and guidelines, we will discuss some of the most urgent challenges, such as community engagement, benefit sharing, protection and empowerment of filed workers, and the prevention of ethics dumping'.
From rare cancers to Myalgic Encephalomyelitis & long COVID
March 26, 2026 5pm London time
Many high-burden conditions remain locked in a cycle of neglect: limited research funding leads to limited data, which in turn makes it harder to secure the grants needed to build real research momentum. This is particularly true for less common and rare cancers, and post-infectious diseases (including Long Covid and ME-CFS). In this seminar, we present a practical and repeatable model for breaking that cycle.
Drawing on international consortia established in rare cancers (atomCAT and DIGICORE), our speakers show how multi-centre research in under-resourced disease areas can be delivered at scale using privacy-preserving federated analytic approaches. This enables robust analysis across countries without centrally pooling sensitive patient data, helping collaborations remain compliant with privacy laws and modern governance requirements.
The session describes how Action For ME want to apply this model to paediatric ME/CFS and Long Covid, starting with international clinical audit and quality improvement: comparing diagnostic pathways, service access, treatment approaches and early outcomes across countries.
The tango of pharmaceutical innovation: choreographing complement and conflict
April 9, 2026 5pm London UK
Pharmaceutical innovation requires contributions from both the public and private sectors and is expected to provide returns to a wide range of stakeholders. This talk describes the innovation ecosystem through the sources of capital that support successive stages of research, development, and commercialization of pharmaceutical products. The analysis highlights the complementary roles of public institutions, emerging biotechnology companies, and large pharmaceutical manufacturers, the increasing role of financialization in corporate strategies and profits, the value created by innovative pharmaceutical products, and the distribution of this value among different stakeholders. Effective innovation can be viewed as a dance between stakeholders with complementary and conflicting roles, capabilities and expectations. These findings provide an evidence-basis for advancing practices and policies that improve the efficiency of pharmaceutical innovation ensure equitable returns to diverse stakeholders.
Slides | Video
What is “Herding” in the bio pharmaceutical industry?
May 7, 2026 5pm London time
Despite major advances in the understanding of the molecular pathology of diseases and advances in technologies applied to drug discovery, the bio pharmaceutical industry continues to be less and less efficient at drug discovery (see “Eroom’s Law”). In oncology, 95% of drug discovery projects fail, costing $60bn a year. Exacerbating these losses, companies “herd”. Here, many companies compete simultaneously to find drugs against the same target, in a “herd”, believing that if others are also working on it, it reduces the risk of failure (the comfort of a herd). It doesn’t. It amplifies the loss of human and financial resources as attrition bites. In this seminar we discuss Consilium Scientific's publication on “herding” around TIGIT (T-cell immunoreceptor with Ig and immunoreceptor tyrosine-based inhibitory motif domains), a failing immunotherapy target. Twenty-one companies have spent $3.5bn on 220 clinical trials of 30 TIGIT inhibitors, involving 49k patients. With ongoing but failing clinical trials, no TIGIT inhibitors are yet approved for clinical use. Because of attrition, herding has amplified the loss of financial and human resources. What can be learned?
Likes, Trends and Testimonials: When Online Influence Replaces Evidence in Healthcare
May 21, 2026 5pm London, UK
From Ozempic influencers to AI-powered diagnoses, from wearable tech to preventative screening packages — the internet has fundamentally changed how people think about, seek out, and act on health information. But how much of what is being sold to us actually works? And who is watching?
We are joined by Deborah Cohen — medically trained journalist, former head of investigations at The BMJ, and former health correspondent for BBC Newsnight and ITV News — to discuss the ideas behind her book Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health (2025).
Drawing on years of investigative reporting, Dr Cohen examines how a perfect storm of overwhelmed health systems, long GP waiting times, and the rise of social media has created fertile ground for a new kind of health influence — one where personal testimonials and viral trends routinely carry more weight than peer-reviewed evidence. Doctors promote untested therapies, celebrities sell solutions, and wellness brands offer the seductive promise of control over your own body. The problem, as Cohen argues, is that many of these products, tests, and gadgets have no proven value — and some may actively cause harm.
This event will explore how medicine and marketing became so difficult to tell apart, what this means for patients and health systems, and what — if anything — can be done about it.