Heroes of the COVID Crisis: How Dr. Rajarshi Banerjee of Perspectum Stepped Up To Make A Difference During The Covid19 Pandemic
To me, people are not ‘driven to be heroes’. Wanting to be a hero is not a career option. Serving others, in many different ways — hospitality, healthcare, education, transportation, retail, civil/government or public official service — are career options, and if one does so at personal cost, risk, or sacrifice, that becomes heroic. But to begin with, all one needs to do is to do the right thing for others.
As part of my series about people who stepped up to make a difference during the COVID19 Pandemic, I had the pleasure of interviewing Rajarshi Banerjee.
Rajarshi Banerjee is the CEO of Perspectum, which he co-founded in 2012. He graduated in medicine from the University of Oxford and went on to complete a MPH at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, before returning to Oxford, for his doctorate. He developed the magnetic resonance imaging techniques for rapid non-invasive liver assessment in Oxford and commercialized the method as LiverMultiScan. Dr. Banerjee continues to work as a Consultant Physician with Oxford University Hospitals NHS (National Health Service) Foundation Trust, with research into the phenotyping of liver disease at an individual and population level in adults and children.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about how and where you grew up?
I grew up in west London, the only child of two wonderful and hard-working Indian parents. My dad was an engineer, my mother a computer scientist (at a time when not many women, let alone immigrant Asian women, studied computer science). Clearly I grew up useless at both, but, apart from design and engineering and computer studies, I was otherwise good in school.
As a kid, I was also lucky to make good friends, some of whom also went through University with me, and I am privileged to still be in touch with today.
I studied medicine at Oxford, graduating in 2002 before moving to London to complete my general medical training and begin a specialist registrar rotation in general medicine and cardiology.
During the first two years of my general medical training, I became interested in acquired heart and liver disease. ‘At the coalface’ in medical admission units and cardiology wards there was an alarming rise in the prevalence of coexistent cardiovascular and liver disease, driven by obesity and alcohol use. When we discovered how to assess these patients holistically by looking at all their organs, we were compelled to develop the technology to make it ready for patient use.
As a 43-year-old, I still have the musical taste of a teenager. One Direction, Ariana Grande, and Justin Bieber — I knew they would be huge when I first heard their first releases.
https://alumni.web.ox.ac.uk/article/long-covid-experts-perspectum-share-startling-research
Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
Fooled by Randomness and the subsequent Anti-fragility by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. In medicine we are pretty well trained for risk calculation and communication, but the risks are carried by patients. As I grow older, and see my parents and peers age, that risk becomes more personal and individual, seen more from the patient’s side. These books were a real lesson for me in looking at the big things in life, not the small things that are sometimes easier to focus on.
Seeing the initial scans from patients with long Covid was a Black Swan moment — about a quarter of patients had clear cardiac damage. We were scared to believe this, and many people still will not accept it, but we needed to, and beyond that make it possible to assess the thousands of people who are affected.
Do you have a favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life or your work?
When we started Perspectum, I heard a lot of people say, ‘Fail fast, fail early.’ I still hear this said a lot, and also ‘Don’t fear failure’. It makes sense if you do not care about you are doing, or the impact it may have on others. But I come from medicine, where you would not dream of this.
At Perspectum, we try to look out for each other and say, ‘Don’t fail’, just as we would in a hospital setting. We have failed in our nine years, and I am sure we will in the future, but I hope never because we have become complacent in our ‘fail fast, fail early’ attitude. Get it right, back up every position, and aim for flawless execution. And yes, that means hard work and long hours, but also real achievement that people can take pride in. And it means when we say we will make something better, our employees and patients know that we will do it.
In terms of life lessons, the Fast and the Furious has several that come to mind. For example:
“Life’s simple. You make choices and you don’t look back.” — Han Lue
Ok, thank you for all that. Now let’s move to the main focus of our interview. You are currently leading a social impact organization that has stepped up during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Can you tell us a bit about what you and your organization are trying to address?
When Covid was declared a pandemic, many healthcare workers and employees of Perspectum asked what we could do to help. We are a medical technology company and were already established in building software and imaging applications for healthcare. We have many great diagnostics scientists, and we are as a company committed to charting the uncharted in matters of public health and healthcare. It was only natural to focus our energies on Covid-19.
The long-term impacts of Covid outside the lungs were not known in April 2020, so we undertook the world’s largest study in mapping organ health in ‘post-Covid’ individuals. This was before long Covid was named in May in a tweet, and then the phrase was picked up by many patient advocacy groups. As an organization, we were the first to show the organ damage that occurs in patients even if they have not been hospitalized. From that point, we built a medical device that could use existing MRI scanners coupled with our advanced software services to look at multiple organs in a single 30-minute scan to find out if a patient has organ damage after Covid. We see this in 70 percent of Covid patients who have persistent symptoms; a quarter of these patients have two or more organs damaged.
In your opinion, what does it mean to be a hero?
To me, being a hero is a function of serving others when they most need it. This can be a parent collecting your child from school when you are delayed and feeling desperately guilty, or a biotech company making a vaccine for a global pandemic to allow people to meet again.
It’s a Wonderful Life has the best hero story ever — the protagonist George Bailey is about to jump off a bridge to earn life insurance money for his family, when he sees someone else do it just before him, and then jumps in to save them. His next action is governed by service of the need closest to him that he can meet, throughout the film. This is why I love Christmas — all the great Marvel and DC characters follow this similar arc.
In terms of the COVID crisis, we know that we are in service of the needs closest to us- we can see that organ damage is there in patients with persistent COVID symptoms. Now we need to help physicians determine how to create a treatment path forward for those patients.
In your opinion or experience, what are “5 characteristics of a hero? Please share a story or example for each.
Reliability — you know they will turn up deliver. No point bringing your superpowers to a crisis after it has unfolded.
Empathy — this is not the same as being nice but involves trying to feel as someone else does. This includes ‘the bad guys’!
Stubbornness — doing the right thing even when other people try to persuade you otherwise. Captain America embodies this.
Sacrifice — without sacrifice, heroism is ‘just’ doing the right thing. Healthcare workers doing their jobs has not been heroic; healthcare workers doing their jobs above and beyond, sometimes living away from their families, and in the face of personal risk and even death — that is heroic.
Making our world better — Sometimes even small acts act as powerful symbols for others. Taking a knee, or, as Ken Frazier, CEO of Merck did, resigning from a government position in protest at the Trump administration’s stance on racism.
If heroism is rooted in doing something difficult, scary, or even self-sacrificing, what do you think drives some people — ordinary people — to become heroes?
To me, people are not ‘driven to be heroes’. Wanting to be a hero is not a career option. Serving others, in many different ways — hospitality, healthcare, education, transportation, retail, civil/government or public official service — are career options, and if one does so at personal cost, risk, or sacrifice, that becomes heroic. But to begin with, all one needs to do is to do the right thing for others.
What was the specific catalyst for you or your organization to take heroic action? At what point did you personally decide that heroic action needed to be taken?
We did not do anything heroic; we did what we could, and also what we should do. We were in a position to use our expertise in diagnosing disease to look at a new disease which had acute and then chronic effects. The nature of the pandemic meant that hospitals focused on acute care, and patients with persistent but non-life-threatening symptoms from Covid were not being seen, and no research was being done to better understand what was going on.
My colleagues Mary Xu (nurse), Andrea Dennis (scientist), Andrea Borghetto (radiographer/MR technologist) had the foresight, with the help of the whole company, to design and execute the world’s first and also largest multiorgan imaging study in the long-term effects on organs in patients with Covid. The hope was that this would be minimal; the truth was that many patients had measurable organ damage at 4–5 months after infection, and some had several organs affected. This led us to create a medical service for these patients, so that they could get assessed in a single scan (COVERSCAN), with a clear, actionable report. This was cleared by UK regulators for the benefit of public health with exceptional use authorization, and we are now in discussion with the FDA while also rolling the service out in the UK.
Who are your heroes, or who do you see as heroes today?
Ken Frazier from Merck, Mads Thomson of Novo Foundation, and Paul Stoeffels at Johnson and Johnson are my heroes. Three titans of the medical industry who see into the future and move ahead of others to create better medicines and healthcare systems.
Let’s talk a bit about what is happening in the world today. What specifically frightened or frightens you most about the pandemic?
I am frightened that I could catch Covid, and specifically develop long Covid. It is a frightening illness because it creates disability in young people which they are not prepared for, and also which often gets ignored. More generally, I fear that while I try to juggle commitments to my work, family and friends, I am rarely balancing them all well, and this makes me feel guilty. But I am incredibly lucky to have work, family and friends, so the guilt is assuaged with contentment in the present.
Despite that, what gives you hope for the future? Can you explain?
Patients are beginning to create the healthcare they deserve. With digitalization and globalization, we now have a world where you can have a telehealth consult with the expert of your choice, even if she or he is across the world. Precision medicine is being democratized, and patients are making that happen, more than any other force.
What has inspired you the most about the behavior of people during the pandemic, and what behaviors do you find most disappointing?
People have realized, or been viscerally reminded, of how important we are to each other. Meeting in parks, going for walks, playing with children.
On disappointing behavior — I think many politicians did not appreciate the risk of the pandemic — they should have read Taleb!
Has this crisis caused you to reassess your view of the world or of society? We would love to hear what you mean.
People have had to address some of the larger inequalities in life, as they have been exacerbated by Covid. In the UK, healthcare and transportation workers and public servants mostly come from ethnic minorities and were not well protected. Doctors got protective equipment, but hospital porters did not — two porters at my hospital died in the first wave. Covid-19 has been a ‘syndemic’, with the viral pandemic interacting with our embedded societal structures. We focus on the viral biology a lot more than the societal aspects, because they are less personal. We all understand about the risk of variants which may be more resistant, but these variants arise in places where there is high viral replication and natural selective pressure — which tend to be areas of dense housing with people of lower economic status. We are only as safe as our weakest link, and it has taken a tiny virus to highlight this.
What permanent societal changes would you like to see come out of this crisis?
More inclusive decision-making from a more diverse range of experts — there is often a distinct lack of estrogen and melanin in most corporate or government meetings.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
Young people have a positive impact on society already, by showing us the importance of stewardship. We own nothing, we are just stewards of it for future generations
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
There is a scene in the film Pursuit of Happiness, where Will Smith’s character is shooting hoops with his 5-year-old son, who shouts ‘I’m going Pro!’. Will tells his son to not focus on basketball too much as it is unlikely to be his main career. His son, visibly deflated, stops playing and packs away his ball. Seeing the effect that his caution has had, Will says: “Don’t ever let someone tell you you can’t do something. Not even me. You got a dream, you got to protect it. People can’t do something themselves, they want to tell you ‘You can’t do it’. You want something, you go get it. Period.”
For any entrepreneur or business-maker or inventor of anything new, this message is gold-dust. People criticize regularly; protect your dreams.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Ken Frazier. As a person, he has done more to motivate me than any other person in healthcare. For their 125-year anniversary, Merck published a video. To this day, I watch it when I feel down or overwhelmed.
To quote: ‘At Merck, we do a form of innovation that is extremely risky — it is called invention.’
How can our readers follow you online?
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PerspectumGroup
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/perspectum/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/perspectum-ltd
YouTube: https://youtu.be/gFMxKGGvyJA
Website: https://perspectum.com
Heroes of the COVID Crisis: How Dr Rajarshi Banerjee of Perspectum Stepped Up To Make A Difference was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.