2021 PharmaVoice 100 – The Entrepreneurs: Raj Indupuri, eClinical Solutions

Raj Indupuri

Title: CEO and Co-Founder
Company: eClinical Solutions
Education: MBA, Boston University
Associations: DIA, CDISC, MassBio, Biocom, CLSA

Raj Indupuri is the true definition of an entrepreneur: someone who identifies an unsolved need, takes a risk, and is steadfast in turning that opportunity into a reality. What set him apart are his vision and spark to galvanize others to enact the change he has created. A technologist with more than 23 years of industry experience, Raj is responsible for establishing eClinical Solutions’ vision and future-looking technology strategy. The CEO possesses a real-world understanding of the challenges in clinical development, ingenuity to solve those problems to benefit clinical researchers and patients, and the ability to motivate others to look beyond short-term solutions to create an end-to-end digital transformation accelerator. The inspirational leader is deeply passionate about fostering innovation to revolutionize the life-sciences industry with ground-breaking technologies that will modernize clinical trials and bring treatments to patients faster. With astute business acumen, he is looking beyond the digital future and embracing the progress and potential of data and analytics, which are at the core of the company’s innovative products and solutions.

When eClinical president and co-founder Bob Arnesen met Raj in 2008, Bob recognized Raj as a true risk-taker and someone who firmly believed in his own vision, no matter that the approach went against the tide. At that time, cloud tech was on the rise across many industries, but in life sciences, cloud was not the norm. Many organizations were still focused on the shift to EDC. Undeterred by the highly risk-averse nature of the life-sciences industry, Raj saw the need for a clinical data cloud that could aggregate information and make it accessible and actionable for stakeholders. “What was a chance beginning in the life-sciences industry, drawn by personal life experiences and the motivation to contribute to research, has now become my life’s purpose,” Raj says. “My biggest career highlight to date is the management buy-out of a services company to pursue my passion and a deep-rooted vision to build a software and tech-enabled services company that can bring treatments to patients faster.”

When eClinical Solutions was founded in 2012, the focus was always clinical research enabled by technology, with clinical data at the core. Raj saw the need to unify data and reduce the manual effort well before digital transformation in life sciences became the persistent trend that it is now. While others in the field were still trying to figure out how to transition from paper processes to using an EDC system, Raj saw early on that getting data into an electronic system is actually only the first step to gaining important insights. He knew there needed to be many more modules created to import any format of data from any source. eClinical Solutions has built those modules for its clinical data platform, elluminate, to transform, review, and analyze data to improve efficiencies in studies.

What colleagues find most impressive is that Raj knew from the very beginning that there would be many iterations of the earliest version of elluminate.

The industry had to catch-up with his ultimate vision that was so apparent to him seven and eight years ago.

Raj saw the future game changer not just for data management but for clinical development as a whole, and he set out once again to build on his vision. Raj’s passion has the power to bring these big ideas to life and bring others along with him. He convinced people in the life-sciences industry that cloud-driven technology and solutions were a critical path for clinical research.

Since 2012, elluminate has been helping companies seamlessly integrate and unify all their data sources, including EDC, eCOA, and labs, for streamlined data review, exploration, and new data insights. “We built one of the first clinical data clouds nearly a decade ago with a team of visionaries,” Raj says. “We anticipated the need, and through innovation and perseverance, we evolved elluminate to be a key enabler for digitizing the industry.”

From his early career as an EDC specialist to his current role as the CEO of eClinical Solutions, Raj understands the issues that clinical teams face and why easing the burden of manual tasks in data management is so important in speeding up the drug approval process.

Raj sees a huge opportunity ahead for clinical trials post-COVID-19 and expects to see significant adoption of technologies like AI and machine learning across the complete clinical trials value chain within three to five years.

He says more real-time data will be coming directly from patients via smart devices or apps, and generating value or gathering insights from the data will require leveraging advanced analytics and machine learning models. (PV)