The Human Algorithm · Season 1 · Episode 1
Plant the Seed: Benny Sorensen on Building Medicine Around People
with Benny Sorensen Hemab
- 30 min
About this episode
What does it take to build medicine around people, not technology? Benny Sorensen, MD, PhD, CEO of Hemab Therapeutics, joins The Human Algorithm to share 25 years of "watering the seed" for people living with rare bleeding disorders.
Show notes
It started with one afternoon in a coagulation lab in Denmark. A professor handed a medical student the keys, told him to learn to take his own blood, and sent him to listen to patients’ stories. Benny left determined to help them, and he’s still at it.
In this episode
- Why Hemab calls itself a people company, not a platform company
- The children’s book Benny calls his “business acumen”
- What Genzyme’s Henri Termeer taught him about building medicine that matters
- Why he’s proud to be “a very unreasonable human being”
- How patients can make their voices count, from natural history studies to clinical trials
- Why people living with Glanzmann thrombasthenia helped shape Hemab’s Phase 3 trial protocol
Chapters
- 0:00 Welcome to The Human Algorithm
- 0:18 Meet Benny Sorensen
- 1:55 The afternoon that started it all
- 3:16 “The Carrot Seed”
- 5:08 A people company, not a platform company
- 6:26 What patients don’t see about a CEO
- 8:15 Lessons from Henri Termeer
- 9:51 Why Benny is “a very unreasonable human being”
- 14:33 When persistence turns into stubbornness
- 15:39 What the textbooks don’t teach
- 17:12 Reimagining life with a rare disease
- 19:28 How patients can make their voices count
- 22:01 Patients in the protocol “war room”
- 25:43 One idea to take away
- 28:01 Thank you
