With recent and rapid advances in data science, genomics, wearables and AI, we have an unprecedented opportunity to develop high impact, low cost, scalable interventions that can transform our model of healthcare and improve the health of billions of people across the world.
Dr Raghib Ali crossed from clinical medicine into epidemiology and now leads Our Future Health – a research programme built around finding disease earlier and understanding risk at population scale.
Raghib Ali grew up with the consequences of late diagnosis close to home.
His father lost his sight and livelihood to glaucoma. Ali went on to study medicine and work as an NHS physician.
But the question planted by that experience was larger than any one consultation.
Why do so many people become seriously ill from conditions that might have been caught earlier – or prevented entirely?
Epidemiology offered a way to change the scale.
Ali’s research has included groups historically underrepresented in health studies, asking how risk differs across populations and what better data might reveal.
That work now sits at the centre of Our Future Health.
The programme is bringing together health information, biological samples and lifestyle data from millions of participants so approved researchers can investigate new ways to prevent, detect and treat disease.
Ali still works across clinical medicine and research.
But the biggest shift in his career has been from treating illness after it arrives to building the evidence that might help stop more of it arriving in the first place.
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