Pangaea Data appoints new CFO and three pharmaceutical experts as advisors

Pangaea Data appoints new CFO and three pharmaceutical experts as advisors

New hires will help drive commercial growth and expansion into the US

Pangaea Data, the UK company that provides a novel AI based software product to its customers from the biopharmaceutical and healthcare industry, has appointed Mr. Simon Coulthard as the new CFO and Professor Mark Musen, Dr. Rick Sax and Mr. Ozgur Tuncer to its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB).

Mr. Simon Coulthard is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants with thirty years of accounting and financial leadership experience. He joins Pangaea from Congenica, a cutting-edge digital health company spun out of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, where he was instrumental in their recent $50m Series C funding round. Mr. Coulthard has grown companies from early stage to market leaders, has experienced private equity backed buy-outs and has exited companies through secondary sales, doubling the enterprise value to £55m in 18 months. He will leverage the benefits of a decade of international experience in software development and the recent global growth in Congenica's digital health platform to accelerate the expansion of Pangaea's product offerings in key strategic markets within the US healthcare and pharmaceutical industry. Mr. Coulthard will be in charge of the financial reporting, planning and analysis, accounting, business intelligence and controls to ensure that governance and other financial foundations are in place to support the rapid expansion of Pangaea’s commercial operations on a global scale.

Professor Mark Musen is a professor of Biomedical Informatics and Director of the Stanford Centre for Biomedical Informatics Research at Stanford University. He chaired the Health Informatics and Modelling Topic Advisory Group for the World Health Organisation’s revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and is also the principal investigator of Center for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR). Professor Musen’s wealth of experience and knowledge will help Pangaea to scale its presence in the US and apply its novel AI through new collaborations in the US.

Dr. Rick Sax, previously a Senior Vice President at IQVIA and formerly a Clinical Vice-President at AstraZeneca and Mr. Ozgur Tuncer, Global Vice President, Financial Institutions at IQVIA and Investment Partner at Ascension Life Sciences Fund, have also joined Pangaea as senior advisors. Dr. Sax has established himself as an expert on drug research and development, advising UK and US venture capitalists on the risk perspective of pharmaceutical investments and asset development strategies. Mr. Tuncer advises senior decision makers in the biopharmaceutical industry across Europe, USA and Middle East, focusing on M&A, valuations and portfolio management. Their addition to Pangaea’s SAB will help the company explore strategic opportunities with key stakeholders in the life sciences industry and further develop the current product offering to help scientists and clinicians transform currently manual processes so they can focus on their core aspects of scientific interpretation and clinical decision making.

These appointments firmly establish Pangaea as a leader within the Life Sciences sector and help shape the company’s future growth strategy. This includes the expansion of application of Pangaea’s breakthrough AI, which helps pharmaceutical companies unlock hidden value from textual data for the benefit of finding more suitable patients at scale for drug discovery, clinical trials and new product (drug) launches. The company has successfully extended the application of its AI for automatic generation of clinical study reports and similar documents based on tables of experimental data; and for faster discovery of adverse events, which is critical for pharmacovigilance.

Speaking on the appointment, Mr. Simon Coulthard, CFO of Pangaea Data commented “I am delighted to join the team at Pangaea. The work they have been doing using AI to extract vital information from doctors’ notes, discharge summaries and other sources is revolutionising how the pharmaceutical industry finds cohorts for drug trials, taking a process that usually takes several months down to a few weeks. The connections they have already established with key players in the pharmaceutical market clearly demonstrate their unique offering. I look forward to working with the leadership team to further scale the business and achieve increasing recurring revenues as their platform is used for multiple applications across an enterprise.”

Dr. Vibhor Gupta, Founder and CEO of Pangaea Data stated “The additions of Mr. Simon Coulthard, Professor Mark Musen, Dr. Rick Sax and Mr. Ozgur Tuncer to our team will have a significant impact on the growth of our company. Their combined industry experiences of more than 60 years and global networks are unparalleled. At a time when our novel AI is being embedded within the core life sciences infrastructure, their knowledge will be invaluable to help us scale and expand in new markets.”

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Notes to editor

About Pangaea Data

Pangaea Data Limited have pioneered a product based on their novel unsupervised AI to unlock hidden value from unstructured textual health data, which comprises 80% of patient records and >90% of medical blogs and social media feeds. Pangaea’s product is used by scientists from the biopharmaceutical industry to extract intelligence such as phenotypes (clinical features) so they can stratify patients effectively and find more patients for drug discovery, clinical trial and new product launches at scale, which is otherwise challenging, especially in the context of hard to diagnose conditions such as rare and chronic diseases where 60% of the patient population is not diagnosed accurately. The company has access to more than 500 million patient electronic health records in a privacy preserving federated manner through its partnerships with hospitals and other such providers from the US, UK, Europe, South America and Asia Pacific.

Biopharmaceutical companies are also using the product to automatically generate clinical study reports and the likes from experimental data and to find adverse events for pharmacovigilance. Pangaea continually publish their work in high impact peer reviewed journals.

Pangaea is based in San Francisco, London and Hong Kong and was founded by experienced entrepreneurs who have raised more than £130 million through their academic research and is advised by leading experts from industry, Imperial College London and Stanford University.

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