Global Health & Global Travel w/ Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters

Episode Information

March 9, 2022

Global Health and Vaccines specialist Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters talks about operating on teddy bears, working in Poland, France and America, working in big pharma, the importance of vaccinations, her love of hiking, photographing ghost towns, writing haikus, and more.

Topics Include:

• What inspired her to become a doctor
• What kept her in the pharma industry
• Living and working all over the world, including Poland, France and the U.S.
• Why some vaccines require a booster shot
• The safety of the Covid vaccine and how many lives it has already saved
• How doctors play the role of gatekeepers in big pharma
• How doctors ensure medical device companies and big pharma don’t lose perspective of the end goal, which is always the patient’s wellbeing.
• How Doctorpedia is a fantastic concept: medical information created for the public by doctors, not only credible but also trustworthy
• Travelling to far-off ghost towns and photographing them
• Mindfulness, hiking and writing haiku

Highlights

• “Once I actually had to go to hospital for a small surgery. I think I was six years old at that time. And the surgery went well and there were no complications. I really was fascinated with all the equipment that I saw there and all the drugs and all the scalpels and the ways surgeons were treating children and for whatever reason, my doctor decided to give me a drip as a gift. It’s interesting to think that they thought it was a good gift for a child. When I got home, I started treating my teddies. I was basically pouring a lot of water into this poor teddy bear.”
• “What really kept me in the pharma industry was the moment when I saw the extent of the impact we had on the disease diagnosis and treatment, we did a lot of medical education around diagnosing depression and the new treatments and we started seeing the epidemiology data that was showing that not only more patients were diagnosed, patients who were previously not diagnosed and were going on with depression without any treatment and any diagnosis, we started seeing the impact on suicide rates because 60% of suicides are linked to depression. So once you diagnose depression properly and then treat it well, the suicides usually go down and I think this was the point of no return for me when I really realized how big an impact we can have on population health.”
• “Already in the U.S., COVID vaccines are saving lives. And I think that’s probably the most important thing that I would say to people who were hesitant. We have already vaccinated more than 160 million Americans. We have very stringent methods in place to find all of the potentially serious side effects. And we did find a few needles in the haystack.”
• “From whatever I hear both from the pharmaceutical companies who manufacture vaccines, as well as from the FDA and CDC, we do expect that boosters [for the Covid vaccine] will be needed. In vaccination, it’s not uncommon sometimes to find out that after some time – it can be months, it can be years – the immune response gets weaker, especially if a person did not necessarily contact the virus or pathogen in the meantime. It then does not protect against this particular pathogen as well as it did just after vaccination and then we give boosters. So it’s very common to give another dose after a while to strengthen the immune response.”
• “Drug companies actually do a lot of education and are a major sponsor of medical education … I think physicians are very well positioned to lead such efforts connected to medical education in the companies, because we understand science maybe better than other colleagues who may have different types of backgrounds. So we know what physicians want to hear. We know what physicians need to know in order to be confident to prescribe certain drugs, we know what they need to know about side effects to also make sure that patients get the best possible outcomes.”
• “I have always liked nature. I was always hiking. I grew up not too far from the mountains in Poland so I used to go to the mountains all the time. I think that’s my preferred landscape and there are plenty of mountains here in Nevada. Las Vegas, where we live, is surrounded by mountains. So I started going to the mountains. I started going to state parks. I started hiking in different canyons. And then I discovered that because of the gold rush history, in Nevada, there are all these ghost towns that are left behind, because obviously they exploited whatever was there to exploit, the gold or some other types of ore and the people left. The part of American history which fascinates me the most is this pioneering spirit, discovering new things, going after the next shiny object until it doesn’t exist anymore and then just leaving everything behind and moving to the next thing.”
• “Every doctor who practices medicine is first and foremost thinking about the wellbeing of their patients, however, when you work for the industry, it sometimes gets a little bit lost in the process. So you may be more interested in sales results or you may be more interested in regulatory approval of your new product. I have met many doctors who also work for the industry and who are a little bit like me. We are the people who keep bringing the patient’s wellbeing to the discussion. And it’s not because pharma or the medical device industry does not think about the patient’s wellbeing – at the end, there is always a patient. However we need to make sure that we don’t lose perspective, that we continuously bring up how it will help the patient.”
• “I think that many people working for the pharma industry are very concerned about the patients. And there are also many doctors working for the industry and for us, the main focus is always the patient. I think that sometimes the perception is that we are like one big black hole and a person like you or any other patient doesn’t really know what’s inside this big pharma but there are many, many doctors who work for the industry and I can reassure you and others that the doctors’ concern is always about the wellbeing of patients.”
• “As doctors working for big pharma, we are the ones who do clinical trials. We are the ones who approve what the company can say externally. … In industry, physicians frequently play the role of a gatekeeper and tell marketing and sales colleagues what they can say about specific treatment or not how much balance has to be added: If you talk about the fantastic efficacy of your drug, you need to talk about side effects, one cannot be spoken about without the other. So we are responsible for the balance, we are responsible for the accuracy of the message, and then the fact that it has to be based on the existing evidence. So marketing in big industry like pharma and medical devices is very much regulated and doctors play a role to really ensure that the company is saying things that are truthful and balanced.”
• “I came across Doctorpedia because a friend of mine on LinkedIn wrote to me about them. And I looked at this and I was like, “Oh my God, what a fantastic concept.”
• “During the pandemic, I found myself working for 12 hours a day, sometimes 16 hours and really being totally exhausted. And even mindful meditation was not so helpful anymore. I needed to find some other outlet for keeping myself healthy other than just hiking and maybe some mindfulness. And I read somewhere that that creativity actually helps… I came across haiku which is a very short form of poetry and I was like, “This is perfect for me.” And then I found out that there are some other short forms of poetry as well. So I’m experimenting with all of them and combining them with my photography to create a form that includes both a photograph and a short poem.”

Relevant Links

• Doctor Profile
• Photography Instagram Page
• Twitter

Episode Transcript

Daniel Lobell: (00:00)
This podcast or any written material derived from its transcripts represents the opinions of the medical professional being interviewed. The content here is for informational purposes only, and should not be taken as medical advice since every person is unique. Please consult your healthcare professional for any personal or specific needs.

Daniel Lobell: (00:21)
Hello and welcome to the Doctorpedia podcast. I’m your host Daniel Lobell and I’m honored today to be on the phone with Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters. How are you?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (00:30)
I am great. How are you, Daniel?

Daniel Lobell: (00:32)
Good. I think you’re our very first doctor from Poland on the podcast, which is exciting.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (00:39)
Thank you.

Daniel Lobell: (00:40)
But more than that, you’re also our first doctor who is working on the other side of medicine, in the industry side. And I want to get into all of that with regards to medical supplies, but first let’s go back to the beginning. I read a little bit about you and I found your story to be endearing – how you performed surgeries on a teddy bear as a child and that’s how you wound up knowing you wanted to go into medicine. I’ll let you tell it.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (01:11)
Thank you, Daniel. So I grew up in a house where my mother was a doctor, so I was around syringes and needles for my entire childhood. At that time, my mom kept some of that at home to give me and my sister injections in case we were sick. But once I actually had to go to a hospital, I had a small surgery. I think I was six years old at that time. And the surgery went well and there were no complications. It was just a few days in the hospital, but I really was fascinated with all the equipment that I saw there and all the drugs and all the scalpels and the ways surgeons were treating children and for whatever reason, my doctor decided to give me a drip as a gift. It’s interesting to think that they thought it was a good gift for a child.

Daniel Lobell: (02:11)
Like an IV drip?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (02:12)
Yes. Like an IV drip.

Daniel Lobell: (02:14)
Wow.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (02:15)
[Laughs.] When I went back home, I started treating my teddies. I was basically pouring a lot of water into this poor teddy bear.

Daniel Lobell: (02:24)
Not good for the bear.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (02:27)
Not good for the bear, so I think it was actually mistreatment.

Daniel Lobell: (02:29)
[Laughs.]

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (02:29)
And the teddy bear really did not appreciate that. I was just fascinated.

Daniel Lobell: (02:39)
Your first patient might sue for malpractice. [Laughs.]

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (02:41)
It was total malpractice.

Daniel Lobell: (02:46)
[Laughs.] So, would that be typical in Poland when you were growing up that you wouldn’t go to the doctor for injections, or is it only because your mother worked as a doctor, that she would keep syringes in the house and do it there?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (02:57)
It was just because she was a doctor. Normally we obviously would go to a doctor and I think that just because she was a pediatrician, she was treating us and not necessarily sending us to the clinic.

Daniel Lobell: (03:12)
What was the surgery for?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (03:19)
It was for an umbilical hernia.

Daniel Lobell: (03:22)
Umbilical hernia comes from the umbilical cord being cut a certain way, is that correct?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (03:34)
It’s actually a hernia that comes from the fact that the muscles in the middle of your abdomen did not grow together properly and that makes the umbilicus protrude a little bit. It’s not really healthy for a child that’s very active and the hernia may just continue to grow if it’s not treated. So these muscles in the middle of the abdomen have to be stitched together. It’s quite benign and quite common in small children.

Daniel Lobell: (04:11)
And it wasn’t traumatic for you to have had that?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (04:17)
It was not very traumatic. The surgery was under anesthesia. I didn’t feel much pain, so it was not traumatic.

Daniel Lobell: (04:25)
Well, that’s good. But it seems like either way, you made a good thing out of it because you came out of it inspired and it led to an entire life in medicine. And it sounds to me from reading up on you, that you’ve had a very interesting life. You had a whole life in Poland with your first husband and a practice or a career there in medicine. And then you wound up moving all around the United States, living in France with your current husband. I’d like to hear a little bit of that story from when you’re a little kid treating a teddy bear to running around between France and Colorado as a doctor. And how did that transpire, can you take us on that journey?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (05:09)
I think it depends how much time we have.

Daniel Lobell: (05:11)
[Laughs.]

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (05:12)
I’ll try to be concise. [Laughs.] Growing up in Poland so many years ago, it never occurred to me that I could have such an interesting life. I went to university to become a doctor. I graduated, then I did my residency in psychiatry and I worked in a very big psychiatric hospital in the city where I come from, which was Wrocław. I don’t expect anyone to know that particular part of the world.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (05:50)
[Laughs.] I’d like to meet someone who listens to this podcast and actually knows Wrocław. I’d be very happy to exchange my memories with the person who actually went there at least once,.

Daniel Lobell: (06:07)
What block did you grow up on? [Laughs.] Were you right off Cherry Lane?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (06:12)
[Laughs.] Yeah, exactly. That’s what I’m looking for. And so as a rather young physician, I decided to join the pharmaceutical industry.

Daniel Lobell: (06:24)
I believe you said you were in psychology or psychiatry.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (06:32)
Psychiatry. I was working as a psychiatrist.

Daniel Lobell: (06:35)
So was that the impetus there, because you were working with all these drug companies as a psychiatrist, you said, “Let me switch over to the other side and work with those companies?”

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (06:47)
I think it was part of it. I think I was able to see the impact of new drugs that they were bringing to the market. I think this was when the famous new antidepressant Prozac entered the Polish market. It was many years after it was already launched in the US, but I could see how dramatically it changed how we treated depression. And it became a very safe alternative to other drugs that we used before, equally effective, but way safer for patients. So I really saw the power of innovation. I think I always had a knack for new things, and I said, “Well, let me just try. I think I could really add value as a psychiatrist working for one of the companies that that was working in the neuroscience field.”

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (07:45)
Actually, the first company I worked for was Eli Lilly, which is the company that invented Prozac in the first place. So I worked on the other side and what really kept me in the pharma industry was the moment when I saw the extent of the impact we had on the disease diagnosis and treatment. We did a lot of medical education around diagnosing depression and the new treatments. And we started seeing the epidemiology data that was showing that not only were more patients now being diagnosed, but also patients who were previously not diagnosed and were going on with depression without any treatment and any diagnosis, we started seeing the impact of this on suicide rates, because 60% of suicides are linked to depression. So once you diagnose depression properly and then treat it well, the suicides usually go down and I think this was the point of no return for me – when I really realized how big of an impact we can have on population health. And later when I worked for other companies, and I finally started working for vaccine manufacturers, I saw a huge impact of newly introduced vaccines on disease incidence, which really typically go down dramatically after a vaccine is introduced.

Daniel Lobell: (09:17)
This is such a hot topic nowadays with the vaccines for COVID being out and so many people being so ecstatic about them and on the other end of it, people being so hesitant to get them and afraid of them. From your background working in vaccines, what would you say to people right now about the COVID vaccines?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (09:50)
So I would probably start with the history of vaccination and explain that when we look into the history of vaccination, we’ve been able to avoid millions of disease cases and probably hundreds of thousands, if not maybe millions of deaths in the past, because we introduced vaccines against different diseases and even the COVID vaccines in the United States, it’s already estimated that they have helped prevent nearly 140,000 deaths between the time when they were introduced until last May. So already in the U.S., COVID vaccines are saving lives. And I think that’s probably the most important thing that I would say to people who were hesitant. We vaccinated already more than 160 million Americans. We have very stringent methods in place to find all of the potentially serious side effects. And we did find a few needles in the haystack.

Daniel Lobell: (10:55)
Were you involved with these vaccines?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (10:58)
I was not involved with COVID vaccines. I just watched this field very carefully because in the current company where I work, we actually also care about health of our associates. We strongly promote vaccination and I watched the field because we have lots of communication efforts to encourage vaccination.

Daniel Lobell: (11:20)
Makes sense.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (11:24)
We follow up very stringently on all side effects and try to find out how related they are to the vaccine. So not only are they proven to be effective in clinical trials, and already in real world trials, but also they are incredibly safe. So there are just millions of proofs of that.

Daniel Lobell: (11:52)
Why is it that after you get the vaccine, your arm hurts for so long?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (11:59)
It is basically your immune system responding to the antigens that are produced because of the vaccine that was given and the local side effects and some some general side effects like chills and fever are really a way of your immune system working on producing antibodies against COVID. And this is really a sign of your immune system working. So that’s why it hurts.

Daniel Lobell: (12:34)
Why do they need booster shots? And do you anticipate that they will come out with one where you don’t need to continue getting booster shots?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (12:44)
Again, I have not necessarily seen the studies that were submitted to the FDA. So what I’m saying is a little bit of speculation, but from whatever I hear both from the pharmaceutical companies who manufacture vaccines, as well as from the FDA and CDC, we do expect that boosters will be needed. In vaccination, it’s not uncommon sometimes to find out that after some time – it can be months, it can be years -the immune response gets weaker, especially if a person did not necessarily contact the virus or pathogen in the meantime. So the immune system gets a little bit weaker and does not protect against this particular pathogen as well as it did just after vaccination and then we give boosters. There are many vaccines that need boosters, the Tetanus vaccine needs a booster, the MMR vaccine needs a booster, the DTap vaccine needs a booster. So it’s very common to give another dose after a while to strengthen the immune response. What I see happening in other countries, and I’m thinking it may also happen in the US, is that these boosters are currently recommended to people above 60 because their immune system is generally a little weaker. So it’s also to be expected that their immune response declines a little faster. I’m expecting this to happen in the U.S. as well.

Daniel Lobell: (14:30)
Will the boosters be like every six months every year? Or is it a one time thing? What do you anticipate will be the trajectory for them?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (14:40)
Again, this is really speculation at this time, but what I’m expecting is that because the virus will continue to evolve, we just don’t have enough people vaccinated, we are fertile ground for the virus to continue to evolve and create some new variants. I think that as long as we will have a relatively high level of infections in the community, the virus will continue to evolve and we will need to give boosters every few months. I think it may come to giving it every year, like flu or more rarely. And again, maybe not all age groups will require a booster, maybe just more vulnerable age groups.

Daniel Lobell: (15:30)
There will have to be some type of test to see how many antibodies you still have that people can easily do to know if they need it.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (15:39)
It is a possibility as well. There are some other vaccines where we know the level of antibodies that is protective. It is actually called the correlate of protection. And if we know that we can actually check if the antibody level is at the right level, and it happens with hepatitis B vaccine, for example, that you can check the immune titers meaning the level of antibodies. However, I also would like to say that antibodies are not the only line of protection because we also have so-called memory cells. These are the cells that keep the memory of any antigen, any pathogen that they ever encountered in our lives and they can mobilize very quickly to produce antibodies that are needed. So this is another line of defense, and there is yet another line of defense of cells who basically kill cells that are infected with the virus. So we have multiple lines of defense and antibody is the one that we can test easily but it’s by no means the only one.

Daniel Lobell: (16:55)
So there’s no way we can do memory tests on the cells to see, “Do you remember … ?” [Laughs.]

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (17:03)
I’d love to have this type of test and they are available, but not for general use. They are available in some clinical trials: you actually test some of this in very sophisticated clinical trials, but these are not tests that we could deploy to the whole population and see how our memory cells actually behave. I’d love to have a test like that.

Daniel Lobell: (17:30)
People who suffer with Alzheimer’s have poor memory cells as well?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (17:35)
They have all sorts of other problems. I think poor memory cells might be one of them. After all, they’re a little older. So they probably also don’t have the right immune response, but I think their problems are a little different.

Daniel Lobell: (17:50)
I imagine they are. I was wondering if they do have good working memory cells. I wonder if there’s a way to use those memory cells for the memory, but I don’t know.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (17:59)
Well, that’s a nice theory. We can test it.

Daniel Lobell: (18:01)
[Laughs.] We? I’m part of it? [Laughs.]

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (18:07)
I mean the scientific community.

Daniel Lobell: (18:10)
Oh, I thought you and me?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (18:12)
[Laughs.] Yeah, not you and I, no. [Laughs.]

Daniel Lobell: (18:16)
I was this close to solving Alzheimer’s with you. It felt good for a second. [Laughs.] We took a major derail, but it was too fascinating to resist asking you about COVID right now. Going back, you were working as a psychiatrist. You wind up getting fascinated by these drugs that are changing lives. You see how they’re stopping suicides. Prozac specifically you said was a game changer. You wind up working for Eli Lilly and then what happens?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (18:53)
And then Eli Lilly asked me to come to the U.S. They had an interesting position in the global marketing team and they thought that I could be very useful as a psychiatrist. I was working on some global medical education programs. I was working, supporting some data presentation at conferences, developing some aspects of the overall scientific strategy. So it was a very interesting position. And then I went back to Poland. I joined another company, Merck which at the time was one of the biggest and still is one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the US. And with Merck, after a few years in Poland, I went back to the U.S. again.

Daniel Lobell: (19:43)
At this point you were still married to your first husband.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (19:47)
He was just kind of lost in the process already several years before that happened.

Daniel Lobell: (19:54)
So he never wound up moving with you to America?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (19:57)
No, he never did. I don’t think he was as adventurous as I was.

Daniel Lobell: (20:02)
Yeah. Sounds like it. I don’t know him, but it sounds like you’re very adventurous. So if anywhere less than very adventurous, that might be an issue. [Laughs.] So you’re running back and forth between Poland and America working for these companies as a psychiatrist, but working on the drug. And how does that work? How are you a psychiatrist, but you’re also working in health education for the drug companies?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (20:35)
Drug companies actually do a lot of education. They are a major sponsor of medical education. In the past, we actually organized a lot of the medical education ourselves. I don’t think it’s the case anymore now. We still sponsor medical education, but it is mostly done by independent organizations. but at that time we did a lot of that ourselves. I think physicians are very well positioned to lead such efforts in the companies, because we understand science maybe better than other colleagues who may have different type of backgrounds. So we know what physicians want to hear. We know what physicians need to know in order to be confident to prescribe certain drugs, we know what they need to know about side effects to also make sure that patients get the best possible outcomes. So a very thorough and complete medical education is something that physicians frequently are somehow responsible for or participate in when they work for the industry.

Daniel Lobell: (21:51)
That’s interesting. So you’re like the inside man or woman in this case.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (21:56)
Exactly.

Daniel Lobell: (21:59)
Okay. So current day, you work in medical devices. You’re not in pharmaceuticals anymore. So at some point something changed, but I don’t think we’re at that point yet, right?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (22:11)
No, not yet.

Daniel Lobell: (22:13)
All right. Let’s continue on the story then.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (22:16)
So I moved back to the USA in 2002, and then I was working for Merck and then the plan was that I will stay for a few years and go back to Poland again but I met my husband. So we decided that instead of him moving to Poland, I will stay in the U.S.

Daniel Lobell: (22:41)
Where did you meet him?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (22:42)
I already spoke English, which I think was easier than him learning Polish.

Daniel Lobell: (22:48)
Yeah. I don’t know how hard it is to learn Polish, but given the opportunity to not have to learn it, I’d probably opt out on that one too. [Laughs.]

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (22:56)
[Laughs.] That’s what he did.

Daniel Lobell: (22:58)
No offense. It just seems like a lot. [Laughs.]

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (23:03)
No offense to Polish. I think it’s a beautiful language, but it’s also very difficult for people who have to learn it from scratch.

Daniel Lobell: (23:10)
Does he speak a little Polish at this point? He must just from being around you.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (23:13)
Oh, he just says, “Yes, yes darling” in Polish, which I think is enough.

Daniel Lobell: (23:18)
How do you say “Yes, yes, darling” in Polish?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (23:21)
Tak tak kochanie. [Laughs.]

Daniel Lobell: (23:23)
It’s cool. I like it. [Laughs.]

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (23:27)
It’s enough. Really, he doesn’t have to say anything else.

Daniel Lobell: (23:29)
Look, stick with what you have before he learns how to say “no”.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (23:35)
Yes, I never told him how to say no in Polish.

Daniel Lobell: (23:37)
Good move. So where’d you meet him?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (23:41)
We actually met online on one of the dating sites and then we both lived in New Jersey at that time.

Daniel Lobell: (23:49)
And is he also in the medical industry?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (23:54)
No, not at all. Which is actually quite refreshing because whatever I say, he thinks it’s interesting.

Daniel Lobell: (24:01)
That’s cool. I think it’s interesting too. What does he do?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (24:05)
He’s a business owner. He has a financial background and he always has been a small business owner. So depending on what kind of business he owned at that time, this is the type of gifts I was getting. Like when we met, he owned an electronics store so I was getting cameras as gifts. I still have a few from that time.

Daniel Lobell: (24:29)
What does he do now? What kind of small business?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (24:32)
He owns a hotel right now, so I don’t get any gifts. There aren’t many gifts that he can give me from the hotel.[Laughs.]

Daniel Lobell: (24:39)
[Laughs.] Can’t you stay in the hotel?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (24:42)
I can definitely stay in the hotel.

Daniel Lobell: (24:43)
Well, that’s pretty cool that he owns a hotel – you can’t beat that. And you probably also have unlimited access to that cart that you can bring your luggage up to the room on.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (25:02)
Definitely. I have unlimited access to the swimming pool. I have unlimited access to these little soaps and shampoos if I want them.

Daniel Lobell: (25:11)
So lots of cool stuff. Fantastic. And you’re in Nevada now, right?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (25:16)
Yes. We live in Nevada now.

Daniel Lobell: (25:18)
It’s pretty hot there.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (25:20)
It is very hot.

Daniel Lobell: (25:22)
Today, especially. I know it’s been a very hot day on the West Coast. How is it over there?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (25:30)
I would say that we have more stable weather, even though it’s very hot. We actually have had heat warnings now for a number of weeks. I would say we have less fires than California. It’s probably because we just have less vegetation, to be honest with you, it’s a desert. We occasionally have a smoke coming from California, but we don’t really have so many fires, we don’t have tornadoes, we don’t have tropical storms. So when Ida moved through the U.S., we just got rain and cloudy skies one day. So I think that Nevada is a very interesting place to live as well. It’s a lot of sort of wild west history, lots of ghost towns up in the mountains.

Daniel Lobell: (26:25)
I was reading about that. How you go and photograph these ghost towns? That’s pretty cool. Are they up on Instagram?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (26:32)
Yes. I actually have a profile on Instagram and you can find all of it there.

Daniel Lobell: (26:38)
That’s very cool. Do you want to send people to it? Do you want to promote it?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (26:43)
Yes, it’s my first name Kasia. K A S I A_ HP

Daniel Lobell: (26:50)
Cool. And then, you know, H for Hein and P for Peters.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (26:53)
Exactly. It’s simple. I try not complicate my communication.

Daniel Lobell: (26:59)
What fascinates you about these ghost towns? What started you on this quest to photograph ghost towns?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (27:07)
So, first of all, I have always liked nature. I was always hiking. I grew up in this famous place that we both know very well called Wrocław. It’s not too far from the mountains in Poland. So I used to go to the mountains all the time. I think that’s my preferred landscape and there are plenty of mountains here in Nevada. Las Vegas, where we live is surrounded by mountains. So I started going there. I started going to state parks. I started hiking in different canyons. And then I discovered that because of the gold rush history, in Nevada, there are all these ghost towns that are left behind, because obviously they exploited whatever was there to exploit, the gold or some other types of ore and the people left. So to me, it’s part of the American history which fascinates me the most, this pioneering spirit, discovering new things going after the next shiny object [laughs] until it’s no more and then just leaving everything behind and moving to the next thing.

Daniel Lobell: (28:20)
That falls in line with your life story a lot, you’re running around.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (28:24)
It does a little bit.

Daniel Lobell: (28:25)
Moving from place to place and constantly searching for the newest exciting thing, whether it’s a antidepressant drug or what you’re working with or on now, sounds consistent with who you are.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (28:40)
It does, and it fascinates me. Another fascinating thing about it is that many of these ghost towns are in very remote areas. So when you think about Nevada, it was really inhabited in very different areas 100 years ago than where it is inhabited now and you have to drive to these ghost towns. Sometimes it’s off road, sometimes it’s a very poorly maintained dirt road, because they are just in such remote locations.

Daniel Lobell: (29:12)
Wow. You’re going to have to tell me about some of these to check out because I need new places to check out when I go to Nevada. I like Red Rock Park. That’s beautiful. I’m sure you’ve been there many times.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (29:23)
I’ve been there a couple of times. There’s another park, which is a bit far from Las Vegas, called Valley of Fire. It’s a one hour drive from Las Vegas, towards the north. It may be even more beautiful.

Daniel Lobell: (29:35)
Well, I’m putting that on my list. So you mentioned that you lived in Poland, you lived in New Jersey where you met your husband. You’ve also lived in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Colorado. And as we mentioned currently in Nevada, so were these moves all because of the company you worked for?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (29:57)
Yes. Except for the last one, I always moved where the job took me and, again, my dear husband typically moved with me, so I really appreciate his support. I have to say that not all women have this level of support from their husbands to really move where the job takes them. So I think I really appreciated that throughout our life – only the last move is really unrelated to the job because the pandemic uncovered one thing that we all somehow suspected, but we never really acted upon fully. It uncovered the fact that we can work remotely very well. And obviously, we may lose some creativity if we don’t see each other face to face, but productivity doesn’t suffer. So because my team that I lead at my current company is really located all over the world, the company agreed with me that I could get a completely remote status as an employee and I didn’t have to live in Denver anymore. So because we like Nevada so much already, we just decided to move here.

Daniel Lobell: (31:08)
What was Denver like?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (31:11)
Denver is a growing city. It also has an interesting history and it’s nicely located, close to the mountains. Rocky mountains are fabulous. The problem that I had with Denver was that each time I wanted to go to the mountains on weekends, I had to sit in traffic for two hours, because everybody goes to the mountains on weekends in Colorado. Now here in Nevada, maybe the mountains are a little less impressive, although it’s a question of taste, but I just drive for 30 minutes and I’m on an empty road because nobody comes to Vegas to go to the mountains. So I am just by myself and with a few tourists who maybe got tired of gambling and then a number of local people who actually appreciate scenery, but the mountains here are so accessible.

Daniel Lobell: (32:07)
Yeah.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (32:09)
So I like Denver, but I have to say that it did not meet all my expectations.

Daniel Lobell: (32:14)
Probably not enough ghost towns there either.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (32:17)
Definitely. Although there are some in the mountains in Colorado as well, again, I just never reached them because I had to sit in the traffic.

Daniel Lobell: (32:27)
[Laughs.] I thought about moving to Denver for a minute there during the pandemic, we wound up not even pursuing it enough to go and check it out. Some people told me I wouldn’t like it because of the altitude.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (32:44)
Oh, that’s another thing that some people basically need to adjust to because it’s a mile-high city. So you are at the level of one mile, which means that the air is a little bit thinner, it has a little bit less oxygen. So it usually takes a few weeks to get adjusted to the altitude.

Daniel Lobell: (33:09)
Yeah. Well, I’m not gonna give it a few weeks. I’m not that patient. [Laughs.]

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (33:15)
I started going back to the office lately, and I noticed that when I go back to Denver, I am really short of breath. And initially I thought, “Oh my God, what’s happening to me?” And then I realized that I needed to remember the altitudes.

Daniel Lobell: (33:36)
So let’s get to what you’re doing now. At what point did you leave the pharmaceuticals and go into medical supplies?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (33:46)
I think it was a very smooth transition because both industries are healthcare related industries. They both are about innovation. They both are about improving patient outcomes, treating diseases, just the type of the healthcare intervention is different. In pharmaceuticals, you give a drug, in medical devices, you may implant a stent. The medical device field is very broad and the company I joined, Terumo, is a Japanese medical device company. And the specific branch that I joined is in charge of developing devices, mostly for processing blood and cells. So our devices are frequently used in blood donations. Typically when people donate blood, it could be on one of our devices. And then our devices can also divide blood into components because you don’t always have to transfuse all of the blood. You can transfuse platelets or plasma or red blood cells. So blood has to be divided into components, and that’s done on our devices, for example, as well as some new treatments in immuno-oncology, like CAR-T treatments.

Daniel Lobell: (35:14)
What’s a CAR-T treatment?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (35:16)
It is a type of treatment where you basically collect cells from a patient who has cancer. Then you take these cells, you treat them and grow them in different devices and then expose them to the tumor antigen so they can develop immunity against the specific tumor that the patient has. And then they are transfused back to a patient.

Daniel Lobell: (35:43)
Fascinating.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (35:44)
So we produce devices that actually help to collect these cells and then expand these cells and then maybe store them in some specific ways. So there are other companies who of course produce similar devices, but we have the whole set of devices that help with this process of treating patients through what is called immuno-oncology therapies. It’s very sophisticated and really also moves the medicine forward in terms of helping patients to be treated. Throughout my career, the main thread was to work for companies who developed cutting-edge, really transformative therapeutic methods.

Daniel Lobell: (36:45)
So how did you find out about this Japanese company? And when did you decide you wanted to make this change?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (36:52)
The biggest marketplace now is LinkedIn. So I reached the point when I was looking for a new challenge and when I look for a new challenge, I usually look inside the company that I work for, I look outside – and it just happened that I came across a role that was advertised through LinkedIn. And that’s how I found Terumo.

Daniel Lobell: (37:23)
You mentioned that you’re working on something to do with cancer. Would you call them treatments?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (37:28)
I would call it immuno-oncology. These are different types of treatments for cancers.

Daniel Lobell: (37:33)
That’s not exactly what I pictured when you said medical devices. So am I just off with what I thought the devices are, or is there more to it than that?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (37:45)
You know, medical devices is a very broad category. When you think about a medical device, an orthopedic bed in a hospital is a medical device, a syringe is a medical device, a scalpel is a medical device, our devices that are used in blood centers are medical devices. So it’s a very broad category. And under this category, there are devices that can treat multiple different diseases or are being used in different types of treatments. So it’s probably a much broader category when you think about it, than pharmaceuticals where you basically think drugs.

Daniel Lobell: (38:27)
It’s interesting. You said that in your work, you have a strong focus on patient outcome. And I made a note to myself, “Isn’t that every doctor?” Isn’t everyone focused on patient outcome? What did you mean by that exactly? And how does it differentiate from what we all think when we think ‘doctor’?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (38:58)
So I don’t think it differentiates me very much from other doctors who practice medicine because you’re right. Every doctor who practices medicine is first and foremost thinking about the wellbeing of their patients, however, when you work for the industry, it is sometimes a little bit lost in the process. So you may be more interested in sales results or you may be more interested in regulatory approval of your new product. And I think because I’m working for the industry, I have met many doctors who also work for the industry and who are a little bit like me. We are the people who keep bringing patient wellbeing to the discussion. And it’s not because pharma or the medical device industry does not think about the patient’s wellbeing – in the end, there is always a patient. However, I think that in many discussions, we need to make sure that we don’t lose perspective, that we continuously bring up how it will help the patient.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (40:03)
Does it really make sense to introduce another drug that is really so similar to other drugs, or should we just focus on something else that will help patients more? So there’s always this question, the resources are not infinite, how do we spend our resources to help the patient as much as we can?

Daniel Lobell: (40:24)
It’s reassuring to know there’s somebody out there doing that because when you think of big pharma, you being the regular person, you don’t usually think they have your best interests at heart and you just hope. And I think that’s a lot of why some people have vaccine hesitancy because there is such a great distrust for the pharmaceutical industry and by extension, I suppose, the medical device industry. But to know that there are people out there like yourself who are concerned about the patients, not just about the profits, it’s nice to know and it’s comforting.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (40:57)
I think that many people working for the pharma industry are very concerned about the patients. And there are also many doctors working for the industry and for us, the main focus is always the patient. So I think that sometimes the perception is that we are like one big black hole and a person like you or any other patient doesn’t really know what’s inside this big pharma but there are many, many doctors who work for the industry. And I can reassure you and others that the doctor’s concern is always about the wellbeing of patients. And we are the ones who do clinical trials. We are the ones who approve what the company can say externally. There are other people who approve it as well. But we are first in line telling, for example, our marketing colleagues, if they can say something or not, is it based on the evidence or not? And we are the ones who put the guardrails on what the company can actually say.

Daniel Lobell: (41:59)
It’s a lot of responsibility. Do they listen to you or do they go ahead and do what they want anyway?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (42:04)
They typically listen to us because we usually have the power not to approve it because in industry, physicians frequently play the role of a gatekeeper and tell marketing and sales colleagues what they can say about specific treatment or not, how much balance has to be added: If you talk about the fantastic efficacy of your drug, you need to talk about side effects, one cannot be spoken about without the other. So we are responsible for the balance, we are responsible for the accuracy of the message, and then the fact that it has to be based on the existing evidence. So marketing in big industry like pharma and medical devices is very much regulated and doctors play a role to really ensure that the company is saying things that are truthful and balanced.

Daniel Lobell: (43:04)
What a perfect transition to get into Doctorpedia and how you wound up joining because of your fight against misinformation, which I think is a great reason to be involved with Doctorpedia. I think it’s one of the main reasons that most of the doctors I speak to join because of what Doctorpedia is doing to fight misinformation by giving the consumer or the patient access to real information from real doctors and specialists. How did you wind up connecting with Doctorpedia and what role will you be or are you playing in the company now?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (43:50)
So it’s actually a very good question. And I just would like to add that, especially working in the vaccine field, I’ve been exposed to misinformation for years.

Daniel Lobell: (44:04)
Vaccines, as you know, you can’t take it [Laughs.]

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (44:09)
[Laughs.] I hope that Doctorpedia would become one, so it’s just because the anti-vaccine movement that we all are aware of, and how much damage it’s actually causing every year to people who just may not be able to differentiate between truthful and manipulated information. So I came across Doctorpedia because a friend of mine, a fellow doctor on LinkedIn, actually wrote to me about them and I looked at this and I was like, “Oh my God, what a fantastic concept.” It’s not that we don’t have a lot of health information online, we actually do. But the idea that doctors should be creating information is simple and at the same time, totally breakthrough because there’s lot of information online that maybe people looking at it will not find credible, but in principle people trust doctors, obviously there are some exceptions, but in principle people trust doctors. So if you have information created by doctors, I think it may become one of the most credible sources of health information online.

Daniel Lobell: (45:35)
I hope so.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (45:38)
I certainly hope so. And I think it’s just such an incredible concept, simple, but really breakthrough.

Daniel Lobell: (45:45)
I agree. And to the second part of my question, what role are you playing now with Doctorpedia?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (45:52)
So I became one of the founding partners. I am discussing creating a vaccine channel with my colleagues at Doctorpedia. There’s already information about vaccines, especially COVID vaccines on Doctorpedia. So I encourage everyone who would like to find information about these vaccines to go there and check. But we are thinking about creating a vaccination channel and I promise to help with that.

Daniel Lobell: (46:24)
Well, I’ll be excited to check that out. Sounds like it’ll be great, especially with you behind it.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (46:29)
I will let you know as soon as we produce the first content.

Daniel Lobell: (46:31)
Well, in the meantime, people can hear our talk about vaccines on the podcast here. I usually round off these interviews by asking the doctors to tell me what they do to stay healthy, but we did touch on that because you talked about hiking and your love of mountains and photography. We did not talk about your newfound passion for haikus and short story writing and mindfulness. Perhaps you’d like to go into that and how it came about and what it’s doing for you.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (47:08)
It’s a good question, because even though I believe that the science will help us to get out of this pandemic, I think creativity will help us to get through it as individuals. And for the last few years, I was training myself in mindfulness because it does help to manage everyday stress. But during the pandemic, I found myself working for 12 hours a day, sometimes 16 hours and really being totally exhausted. And even mindful meditation was not so helpful anymore. And I needed to find some other outlet for keeping myself healthy other than just hiking and maybe some mindfulness. And I read somewhere that that creativity actually helps.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (48:04)
So I said, “Well what can I do? I mean, I’m already doing some photography, but I need something a bit more mindful, which focuses my mind on something that’s difficult, maybe something I’ve never done before. I think it was also connected with the fact that I was getting more into trying to understand Japanese culture since the company I work for is Japanese. I came across haiku, which I already knew about. It’s a very short form of poetry. And I was like, “This is perfect for me.” I was always trying to be very concise in my communication. So haiku seems like a perfect form for me to express myself. And I started learning how to write haiku. I started reading some Japanese poets, but then also some American poets who embrace haiku and I believe that I’m a learner. I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as a poet, I am learning. And then I found out that there are some other short forms of poetry as well. So I’m experimenting with all of them and combining them with my photography to create a form that includes both a photograph and a short poem.

Daniel Lobell: (49:26)
It’s almost photo journalism, but it’s photo poetry.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (49:32)
It’s photo micro-poetry.

Daniel Lobell: (49:35)
Did you come up with that term?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (49:39)
[Laughs.] I just come up with this term right now.

Daniel Lobell: (49:42)
I like it, something new and creative.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (49:46)
And this can be found on my Instagram page, it’s the only place where I just post photos and haiku and very different from my LinkedIn profile. [Laughs.].

Daniel Lobell: (49:58)
And again, that’s your name? K A S I A_ H P.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (50:03)
KASIA HP. Yes, that’s correct.

Daniel Lobell: (50:06)
Well, Dr. Hein-Peters, it’s been an absolute pleasure getting to speak with you. And you’ve given me some new ambitions for my next trip to Nevada. Not Colorado because of the altitude, I think it’s too much of a turn off [laughs] and now the traffic on top of that – Glad I didn’t move there.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: (50:29)
Thank you. It has been a pleasure speaking with you. I really enjoyed our conversations.

Daniel Lobell: (50:36)
This podcast, or any written material derived from its transcripts represents the opinions of the medical professional being interviewed. The content here is for informational purposes only and should not be taken. And as medical advice, since every person is unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any personal or specific needs.