Sarah Chen-Whitfield
Runs the GLP-1 desk. Trained as an endocrinologist at UCSF, covers the drug class she prescribed for a decade before she started writing about it.
- Bylines on file
- 184
- Filing since
- September 2021
- On the masthead
- 5 years
- Filed from
- San Francisco, California
- Desks
- GLP-1 desk (lead)Clinical Practice (contributor)
- Pronouns
- she / her
Sarah runs the GLP-1 desk at Wellness Wire, the single largest reporting operation at the publication. She came to journalism sideways: twelve years of clinical endocrinology at UCSF, a PhD on the molecular mechanics of incretin signaling, and a brief stint at Genentech reviewing the early obesity pipelines.
She writes about what she calls the “gap years” — the stretch between the end of a Phase III trial and the accumulation of long-term observational data, which is where most of the interesting questions in this drug class live.
Before joining Wellness Wire in 2021, she contributed clinical commentary to The New England Journal of Medicine and wrote a well-circulated internal memo at UCSF on titration strategy that — she will tell you — has been cited more than any of her actual publications.
She edits the desk's work on the understanding that her own clinical history is an asset, not a conflict; the disclosure below reflects that tradeoff.
The hardest thing about covering this beat is that the evidence keeps arriving after the headlines do. I try to write pieces that are still honest the week the next trial reads out. — Chen-Whitfield, in conversation with the newsroom