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This week Harry sits down with Vangelis Vergetis, the co-founder and co-executive director of Intelligencia, a startup that uses big data and machine learning to help pharmaceutical companies make better decisions throughout the drug development process. Vergetis argues that if you put a group of pharma executives in a conference room, then add an extra chair for a machine-learning system, the whole group ends up smarter—and able to make more accurate predictions about which drug candidates will succeed and which will fail.

Bringing better analytics into the pharma industry has been an uphill battle, Vergetis says. One survey by McKinsey, his former employer, showed that financial services companies were the most likely to adopt AI and machine learning tools; the least likely were the building and construction trades. But just one rung up from the bottom was healthcare and pharmaceuticals. "The impact that AI could have on health care is "enormous," Vergetis says. "It's in the trillions. But in terms of AI adoption, we are right above construction—and no offense to construction, but it's not the most innovative industry."

But with the proper data, machine learning algorithms can help drug makers form far more accurate predictions about the probability that a new drug will perform well in Phase I clinical trials, or whether a drug that's succeeded in Phase I should be advanced to Phase II. "For years we've seen the productivity of R&D declining in our space in pharma and biotech, and I refuse to accept that," Vergetis says. "In the era of a lot of data becoming available, in the era of us being able to use techniques like machine learning to do something with that data, there's gotta be a way to reverse that trend."

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Full Transcript

MoneyBall Medicine - Vangelis Vergetis Transcript

Harry Glorikian: I’m Harry Glorikian, and this is MoneyBall Medicine, the interview podcast where we meet researchers, entrepreneurs, and physicians who are using the power of data to improve patient health and make healthcare delivery more efficient. You can think of each episode as a new chapter in the never-ending audio version of my 2017 book, “MoneyBall Medicine: Thriving in the New Data-Driven Healthcare Market.” If you like the show, please do us a favor and leave a rating and review at Apple Podcasts.

Harry Glorikian: My guest today is Vangelis Vergetis, the co-founder and co-executive director of Intelligencia. It’s big-data analytics startup focused on the pharmaceutical industry. And the argument Vergetis make