Episode Details

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with Dr. Connie Lehman, founder and CEO of Clairity.

Clairity is the first FDA-authorized AI platform that predicts a woman's five-year risk of developing breast cancer using only a routine screening mammogram.

A physician scientist with over 300 peer-reviewed publications, Connie is a Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and Breast Imaging Specialist at Massachusetts General Brigham (on leave). She holds an MD and PhD from Yale and was named to Forbes' 50 Over 50 Innovators and TIME 100 World’s Most Influential Leaders in Health.

In this interview, Connie discusses her experience translating academic research into a commercially viable startup, the massive undertaking of generating clinical evidence when you’re creating a new category, and how Clairity is approaching adoption on two fronts: fitting into physician workflows and building access pathways for patients.

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If you'd rather read than listen, here's a link to the full interview with Connie Lehman, which includes a link to ScottBot — an AI version of host Scott Nelson trained on every Medsider interview and playbook. Feel free to ask ScottBot any questions you'd like!

KEY MOMENTS FROM THE INTERVIEW

• (03:04) - The broken screening paradigm Connie saw in clinic — and the gap that became Clairity
• (05:09) - How Clairity rolls the clock back from detection to predicting risk in healthy women
• (07:31) - Why "more data is better" turned out to be wrong and how that shaped Clairity's product scope
• (21:57) - How physicians can translate grant-generating discipline into building a company
• (24:56) - What 18 months of pre-sub meetings revealed about navigating a de novo pathway
• (26:49) - Why Clairity validated its technology in over 250,000 mammograms when FDA required far less
• (34:43) - How Connie flipped the natural question from "how can doctors offer this?" to "how can women access it?"
• (43:47) - How relationships, not pitches, drove Clairity’s $43M Series B