Rafik Fellague-Chebra, MD

Rafik Fellague-Chebra, MD, is a physician who has spent twenty-five years in global oncology drug development and medical affairs, across academia and large pharmaceutical companies.

His work centers on precision medicine, clinical development, biomarkers, and translational research: the long, unglamorous distance between a promising molecule and a treatment that demonstrably helps a patient. It is a profession built on finding out. Most compounds fail. Most elegant mechanisms never help anyone. Twenty-five years of watching that happen produced the discipline behind his writing, which is a refusal to let a result mean more than it has earned.

He trained in microbiome science and health at the Sorbonne and the La Pitié-Salpêtrière medical school, in biostatistics at the Université Paris XI, and completed an Executive Master at HEC Paris.

Half Human, his first book for general readers, applies that training to the gut microbiome: a field he considers one of the most genuinely exciting frontiers in medicine and one of the most oversold. When the evidence is strong, he says so plainly. When a result comes from mice, he says "in mice," every time.