Hutan Ashrafian

Hutan Ashrafian is Chief Scientific Officer of Flagship Pioneering’s Preemptive Medicine and Health Security Initiative. In this role, he is pioneering a portfolio of novel therapeutics and approaches to protect, maintain, or improve people’s health before they get sick.

Hutan is a senior clinician-scientist and surgeon with extensive experience developing novel biomedical and technological methods to address a wide range of healthcare issues. His research has focused on developing innovative and technological strategies to resolve the global healthcare burden of obesity, metabolic syndrome, obesity-related cardiorespiratory disease, musculoskeletal dysfunction, and cancer. He has extensive experience applying AI to medicine. He developed an algorithm with Google to detect breast cancer in screening images and led the translation of this work into clinical practice. He also spearheaded the international STARD-AI and QUADAS-AI global reporting guideline initiatives for diagnostic AI. In collaboration with NICE, he is setting the AI health technology assessment (HTA) benchmarks, and he is co-editor-in-chief of Springer Nature’s comprehensive reference text of AI in Medicine.

Hutan has held multiple scientific and clinical positions including: Chief Scientific Adviser at the Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London; Honorary Senior Clinical Fellow in Surgery at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust; Academic Lead for the Big Data Analytical Unit, Imperial College London; Deputy Director (Academic Lead) for the NHS Digital Academy; Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer at Oxford Medical Products Ltd. His wide-ranging work has been published in a variety of leading journals including Nature, The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Hutan earned his degree in Medicine at University College London where he also received an honors degree in Immunology and Cell Pathology. He holds a Ph.D. in Computational Physiology and Metabolic Surgery from Imperial College London and a health economics-focused M.B.A. with Distinction from Warwick Business School.