Interview with eClinical Solutions CEO Raj Indupuri

Raj Indupuri, CEO, eClinical Solutions, discusses his background, the path that led him to life sciences & leadership, and why his experiences led to the creation of the elluminate Clinical Data Cloud.

Transcript

David Williams:

Raj Indupuri grew up in India, and he took after his entrepreneurial grandfather. He studied mechanical engineering, then got into computers, and ended up working on databases and software at Serono where he also came to appreciate the value of innovative therapeutics. At eClinical Solutions, Raj is focused on data acquisition for research, infrastructure to process data and extract value, and data consumption, including advanced techniques to transform data into intelligent decisions for better outcomes. The pandemic has really accelerated the transformation to digital decentralized trials, and it’s provided strong tailwinds for the company. Looking ahead, they’re working on creating consumer-grade user experiences and leveraging AI and machine learning to eliminate inefficiencies and remove manual processes. Raj is reading Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One, and he’s also reading A Crack in Creation by Jennifer Doudna. I’m your host, David Williams, president of strategy consulting firm Health Business Group. Enjoy the show and subscribe if you like it. Raj Indupuri, CEO of eClinical Solutions. Welcome to the Health Biz podcast.

Raj Indupuri:

Thank you, David. Thanks for having me.

David Williams:

It’s a real pleasure. It sounds like we’re in the same state, but we’re not in the same town. So I don’t feel badly for doing the interview remotely. Yeah. Let’s talk about your upbringing. What was your childhood like and any childhood influences that carry over into your adult life and into your career?

Raj Indupuri:

Yeah, that’s an interesting question that I rarely get asked in a professional setting. So I grew up in India to be specific in Andra Pradesh, a southern state in India. And, growing up, I looked up to my grandfather who was an entrepreneur and we are from a business family. So he was actually a risk-taker and always pushed boundaries. So he was an inspiration I would say. And that would be my primary influence, I would say, growing up.

David Williams:

That sounds good. And then what did you do, in terms of school? What was your education like?

Raj Indupuri:

Yeah, so I did mechanical engineering at Nagarjuna University, South India. And during my engineering, I was exposed to computer programming and software engineering, which I loved and I was quite fascinated. This was early 90s and after engineering, I really wanted to dig deep and learn more. And I thought at that time I’d love to have a career within that space. And after engineering, I ended up doing more courses or classes, learned more around, fundamentals of computer sciences, mostly around databases and database development, and I really felt that’s the space I wanted to build my career in.

David Williams:

That sounds good. Yeah, my oldest son is a mechanical engineer. He’s a software developer and I guess he stayed away from healthcare. He’s seen enough of it around the house with his old dad.

Raj Indupuri:

It’s quite interesting in terms of how, when you do engineering, it doesn’t mean that you’ll end up doing in that — or having a kid in that domain — but, you never know where the journey leads to.

David Williams:

Yeah, well, my wife is actually an electrical engineer and she says I come across like an engineer. Which I’ll take as a compliment, even though I don’t have any engineering training.

Raj Indupuri:

I’m sure it is a compliment.

David Williams:

Now you were at Serono if I’m right. What was your role like there at Serono?

Raj Indupuri:

Yeah, so I came to the US in 97 and my first job was at Serono as a clinical database developer. I was really fortunate to start my career, at Serono — now it’s EMD Serono, it’s a biotech company — again, by luck, I would say I started my career in this industry. And also growing up I witnessed a lot of people who are near and dear to me without access to advanced therapies and medicines, and I saw how they struggled. So when I started my career at Serono, I thought it was quite motivational, if I would use that word, to be part of a company and an industry where you can contribute in your own ways, whether small or big, to impact healthcare and to help bring better therapies or treatments to patients. So there was a purpose that was built-in. So when I started my career at Serono, I decided that this is an industry I want to be part of, and I was really fortunate to continue that journey for the past 25 years, I would say.

David Williams:

Yeah, Raj, one of the interesting things, when we talk about healthcare, and one of the reasons I like working in this space, is that at the end of the day, if you’re helping people, it’s usually helped get some new product to market help, with something that actually might be useful for someone. Now it’s become fashionable to talk about, you know, disparities, within the US. And sometimes given some, at least some discussion about, you know, from a global standpoint, you see it now with the vaccines, but it’s interesting, based on your upbringing in India and coming and seeing there’s a lot of things that would be useful and not just to have as innovations, but to have them widely available.

Raj Indupuri:

Absolutely. There’s no question about it. I think, again, even though the research is being done here, right. I think we have seen that a lot of developing countries are taking advantage of this, right? So again, I think the world is connected. Again, obviously, now things are changing, right? But, this innovation is global, I believe. And it helps not only the people over here, but across the globe.

David Williams:

Now, at eClinical Solutions where you’ve been for quite a while, you didn’t start off as the CEO. You know, sometimes I find people they want to start off, they think highly of themselves just starting off as the CEO, which isn’t always the case. And I’ve had people on the show that have either started their own company or have, you know, been recruited as the CEO when the company was mature or in one case somebody who had worked, I think he started as a pharmacist at Walgreens, and then had worked his way all the way up almost to the top role. You’re somewhere in the middle. You came to eClinical Solutions and have had kind of quite a few roles there before CEO. So why did you go to eClinical and what has the journey been like there up until you began running the place?

Raj Indupuri:

Yeah, it’s another interesting story. So when I was at Serono, like I said, I started as a database developer and I was really fortunate to be part of teams and initiatives where Serono moved from paper-based clinical research processes to electronic processes. If you remember, you’re moving to EDC or electronic data capture, right? So this was late 90s and 2000s. I was part of a technology team and I was leading teams to build Solutions as well to make that shift from paper to electronic processes. So based on that experience, I had an opportunity to come start a division along with few others, which is eClinical Solutions. This was not an independent company back then. It was a division of a bigger company called Eliassen Group. So Eliassen Group is a technology consulting company and they decided to diversify and expand into life sciences and they wanted to build this division.

Raj Indupuri:

So long story short, I came to eClinical Solutions with few others to offer services around, data management, data acquisition, statistical programming, again, to help clinical trial optimization and also advancements for clients in the industry: biotech and pharma clients. I was responsible for building a technology team or the technology Solutions of the division. And we were offering the services to emerging biotech and midmarket or mid-sized biotech and pharma companies. And what we learned, again, this was late 2000s, companies were using different electronic systems. They were outsourcing significantly, data was in different structures, in different formats, in different silos, and data was all over. We used the words data chaos. And what we learned was, this data chaos was only increasing. A lot of these companies are spending millions and millions of dollars to collect this data.

Raj Indupuri:

Yet they have no control over this data and forget about doing analysis or easy access. They didn’t even have any control on their assets. We believed their data was the most valuable — actually data is the currency of the industry — that’s what I believe in. And as a company, we believe in that. So these companies were struggling to take control of this data and we started building software. And, for Eliassen, as a services and technology consulting company, they felt like software is not their core competency. And they decided to divert the business unit. And I was really fortunate to do a management buyout with two other partners, and that’s how we separated eClinical Solutions into an independent organization from Eliassen Group. Once it was spun out, I started leading the company as a CEO.

David Williams:

Got it. Alright. So that’s one way to do it. You know, if you’re not getting a promotion, you say, let’s just get out of here and we’ll take the company with us while we go. Is that about it?

Raj Indupuri:

Yeah, I think you’re right. Again, it’s quite, interesting. I use the word fortunate here as well, right? To be at the right time, at the right place. And, again, when I was part of Eliassen, part of eClinical Solutions, I was really passionate to build software to solve that data problem. So it made it easier for Eliassen to divert this business unit and helped us to do this buyout easily.

David Williams:

Makes sense. Now, when you talk about eClinical Solutions, your focus is on digital trials. I understand that, you know, even in the days when the company was starting up, there was this focus on data and electronic data, but, digital trials is kind of a newer notion. Has eClinical Solutions always been [headed] in that direction or how have things shifted over time?

Raj Indupuri:

Yeah. So since we started eClinical, our mission has been to make clinical research, data acquisition and analysis, easy and intelligent, again, to bring therapies or treatments faster to patients. So, when we started — so we started as a services company and with an aspiration to build enterprise software. And then we evolved into an enterprise software company with technology-enabled services and offerings. So, there was a significant revolution as a company. And your question about the industry revolution, the industry has evolved as well, right? So again, late 90s, early 2000s, even late 200s, the industry has been investing into systems, but mostly transforming paper-based processes to a electronic processes. But we are still not optimizing and realizing the benefits of technologies across the clinical development or clinical research value chain. There are so many inefficiencies, a lot of manual processes, and significant opportunities to improve. And that’s where I believe over the last few years, the digital transformation initiatives within the industries, have evolved. And the industry is now focusing on digitizing everything in the entire clinical research value train, and hence digital trials.

David Williams:

Got it. So, you know, you described kind of the origin of the company and the evolution. If we look — sitting today in the middle of 2022, what are the primary offerings of the company? What are you best known for right now?

Raj Indupuri:

Yeah, so, like I said, we are a software and a services company and, on the software side, we provide a Clinical Data Cloud again with the mission to make research data, acquisition analysis, easy and intelligent. So if you think about the clinical data life cycle from the lens of technology, you could think about the data life cycle as three components. The first component is for research data acquisition. And with digital trials and how trials have been evolving, the amount of data that the companies are collecting as part of research has been significantly increasing, right? So it’s not just EDC systems, but also you have mobile apps, variable devices. So data is being streamed and being collected continuously. So that’s the data acquisition. The second component is the infrastructure or the pipeline, needed to process this data.

Raj Indupuri:

To automate the processing of the data, to have an ability to harvest and extract value of this data… it’s not only the data that’s being collected for a study, but also the data that’s already available within these companies by doing research for other trials. So that’s the second component, the data pipeline and the technology infrastructure to extract value from this data. And the third component is more around data consumption, right? the ability to use advanced techniques or advanced analytics and data sciences to transform this data into intelligent decisions so that you can actually act quickly and also achieve better outcomes, whether it’s faster time to value or reduction in cycle times. So our software has several capabilities to optimize the data, pipeline, the infrastructure, and also to provide analytics and consumption capabilities for different stakeholders within clinical development.

David Williams:

Got it. So who would be your primary audience? Who’s the main customer or user, what sort of companies and what sort of functional roles within the companies?

Raj Indupuri:

Excellent. Our clients are from smaller emerging biotech, to mid-market, to larger clients. And also we actually work with service providers, the CROs, and our software is targeted to or helps multiple stakeholders within clinical development: data managers, biostatisticians, medical data, reviewers, clinical scientists, pharmacovigilance, or safety professionals, and folks within clinical operations. It could be people who are monitoring and also stakeholders who want to monitor and review and have visibility into the trial conduct. So we offer — we actually have capabilities to help all the stakeholders or most of the stakeholders within clinical development.

David Williams:

Got it. Okay. Now the pandemic has affected essentially everything in the world and everywhere in the world, and clinical trials being among them. So how has the pandemic impacted clinical trials and in particular, how does that affect what you do at eClinical Solutions?

Raj Indupuri:

Absolutely. So I think the pandemic, I’m sure you realize this as well, in terms of how we are able to bring vaccines and some of the treatments in unbelievably short amount of time. So, in general, clinical research or clinical trials have been fast evolving from I would say centralized trials to decentralized trials. And, even before the pandemic, as an industry, we were slowly evolving. But what it did was it completely accelerated this evolution. The shift from centralized trials to decentralized trials and the decentralized trials have several benefits for patients, easy access, and helps with diversity and inclusion, helps not to drop out of studies and if I’m sponsors or if I’m sites, less resources, faster enrollments, faster time to value and, last but not least, faster access to data to reduce cycle times and to submit data — high quality data — and high integrity data, quickly.

Raj Indupuri:

So there’s a lot of digital platforms that companies like us are innovating, and the industry has been adopting. So that has been a rapid shift. And, the industry has realized that if there is intent, if there is willingness, you can actually adopt rapidly for better outcomes. So that has been a very welcoming shift, even on the services side, which we offer data management and statistical programming services because of this shift companies are looking for more technology-enabled services, more domain experts who can actually provide these frameworks and foundations to do decentralized trials, the ability to apply risk-based strategies, ability to do remote monitoring, and ability to virtually manage patients and sites. So, that’s fast maturing and evolving as well. So along with these industry trends, we, as a company, are evolving as well. We are actually building new products and new services, and we believe our elluminate Clinical Data Cloud, is no more “nice to have a few years back”, it’s more of a critical platform and becomes a foundation of decentralized trials for companies who want to innovate and rapidly evolve at scale.

David Williams:

So it sounds like, Raj, that a number of these trends were moving forward before the pandemic and the pandemic has accelerated the specific direction that you’re moving, and also shown that adoption can go quickly. If you have something that’s innovative and we don’t need to assume that it’s going to be really slow. So that sounds fairly, fortuitous. And we have to follow you around because you seem to have a way of being in the right place at the right time. I know it’s a lot of hard work too.

David Williams:

So, well, once I turn this off, I’ll ask you for some bets on sports games or something like that, or your lottery number.

David Williams:

So, with all of this… What, you know, what comes next? It sounds like, in some ways, you’re just kind of carrying through what the plan had been for eClinical Solution. Any new things, you mentioned new products, being developed, but if you look out ahead three years, five years, what do you see?

Raj Indupuri:

Yeah, that’s a phenomenal question. So one thing to start with is, I don’t think there’s any going back, right? So, I’m sure that you see that as well. When you talk to other leaders and CEOs, digital transformation or digitization with clinical research or clinical development with R&D is going to accelerate and continue. So as a company, there are a few areas that we are actively pursuing and investing heavily. So I’ll talk about a couple of areas, one creating better user experiences for all the stakeholders involved. So again, as trials are getting more complex, as you have more and more data sources, the expectations from stakeholders are also rapidly evolving and increasing, right? Because we live in a world where you want instant responses, right? And you actually depend on Google for instant responses.

Raj Indupuri:

You depend on Amazon to get whatever you want within hours. You depend on applications or apps like Netflix and, Disney Plus. If you are thinking of a movie or something immediately, you want it with the click of a button, right? So in this world, stakeholders’ expectations in terms of how enterprise software should work or what should be served is evolving and the gap or the bridge between consumer software or applications like Amazon, Netflix, Apple, or Google versus enterprise software. Like, what we are building is reducing. So people don’t have any patience, so they want good workflows, good experiences, instant responses. So I believe that’s an area where as an industry and as software companies, there’ll be more and more investment. So that creates better experiences. So if I’m a consumer, you have similar experiences like what you have in your day to day lives.

Raj Indupuri:

That’s one, the second area that I’m super excited about and where we are investing heavily is around AI and machine learning. So I made a comment earlier in terms of, if you look at the entire clinical development and value chain, there is significant complexities, significant inefficiencies, hence the cost of bringing a drug or a therapy to market is in the billions of dollars and takes years and years, right? So there’s lot of opportunity, across the entire value chain, again, to optimize, to eliminate inefficiencies, to remove manual processes. And we believe AI can play a huge role and we are investing heavily into AI. And our objective is to embed AI and machine learning capabilities within our Clinical Data Cloud & across the data life cycle, whether it’s data, acquisition, data preparation, data analytics. One example I’d give with what we are doing with AI is, as we have more and more data, it’s becoming burdensome for data managers or reviewers to review this or clean manually.

Raj Indupuri:

So, what we are doing is we are building machine learning models where the models will detect these data issues, anomalies or outliers. And these are served to reviewers so that these models are augmenting the work that has been done so that the reviewers can focus on more complex issues. They can perform efficiently, they have a better experience, and you can scale up review as the amount of data is increasing as well. So that’s one example and we are investing heavily into AI and machine learning to automate and address several inefficiencies within the clinical data life cycle. It makes sense.

David Williams:

Great. Sounds like you have your work cut out for you. Now with all that in mind, have you had a chance to do any reading? Any books that you would recommend or recommend that we avoid?

Raj Indupuri:

I don’t recommend that you avoid any. So I just finished actually reading book called Zero to One. So have you ever heard of that one?

David Williams:

I’ve heard of that one, yeah. But tell us more.

Raj Indupuri:

Yeah. It’s an excellent book where, Peter Thiel, he gives his unique perspective on building successful startups and the future, he talks about how monopolies are actually good for businesses and societies. It gives examples about Apple and Google building monopolies. He talks about the skillsets needed for founders and also asking tough questions or elements or questions to be answered, to create a successful company or a startup. I specifically loved the 10X rule. He emphasizes about how companies should be creating technologies or capabilities or innovating so that they are 10 times better than what the status quo is or what the competition is or what’s available in the market. So that’s truly inspirational. And I just read that book and I’d strongly recommend for anyone who hasn’t done that. And one of my other favorite books is, A Crack in Creation. You might have read that. It’s an excellent book. It’s one of my favorites where this book teaches you all about CRISPR gene therapy technology and how gene therapy can be used to eliminate diseases, the opportunities, and also ethical risks, of using gene editing in humans. I think it’s an incredible read and a quite valuable one for everyone, especially if you are in the healthcare and life sciences industry. That’s one of my favorite book I’ll strongly recommend to your listeners.

David Williams:

Sounds good. Well, I haven’t read the Peter Thiel book, but I did just finish a book, I think it was called The Founders Story of PayPal, and it was about the founders of PayPal, which included Peter Thiel along with Elon Musk and a couple of others, and sort of interesting stories about the early days. So I did read about that including that includes a scene where Elon’s driving a McLaren with Peter Thiel and they flip it over and, they walk away from it and they don’t tell anybody what happened, but it was, it was a million dollar car at that time, and at that time a million dollars meant something to Elon Musk.

Raj Indupuri:

Oh my God. Yeah, I’d love to check that out. So did you enjoy reading that?

David Williams:

It’s a good one because it’s, you know, it’s really kind of the origin story, the same way that we talked about in this podcast some of your your early days. I’ve sort of forgotten that Elon was involved in PayPal there and it gives a sense of what they were doing and how crazy it was and how they almost didn’t make it, etcetera. And of course, history could have been a little bit, different.

Raj Indupuri:

There are a lot of people who worked at PayPal who have now become brilliant founders and entrepreneurs. And it’s also referred as PayPal mafia.

David Williams:

That’s what they do. And sometimes people say it gives the mafia a bad name. But it’s interesting because there was, part of where that came from also, there was a photo spread that was done for one of the magazines I’m forgetting now. It was basically all like white men, and that’s not PayPal – PayPal Wasn’t just that actually, and it’s sort of reinforced a wrong kind of notion. So anyway, good book I recommend, as well.

Raj Indupuri:

I’ll definitely check that out.

David Williams:

Good. So Raj Indupuri, CEO of eClinical Solutions and so much more, I want to say thank you for your time and insights today on the HealthBiz podcast.

Raj Indupuri:

Thank you David for having me. I enjoyed the conversation thoroughly.

David Williams:

David Williams, president of health business group. I conduct in-depth interviews with leaders in healthcare, business and policy. If you like what you hear, go ahead and subscribe on your favorite service while you’re at it. Go ahead and subscribe on your second and third favorite services as well. There’s more good stuff to come and you won’t want to miss an episode if your organization is seeking strategy consulting services in healthcare, check out our website, healthbusinessgroup.com.