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

London, 29 March: 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, 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. Simon 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 a decade of international experience in software development and the recent global growth in Congenica's digital health platform to accelerate expansion into Pangaea's key strategic markets within the US healthcare and pharmaceutical industry. Simon 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 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 Modeling Topic Advisory Group for the World Health Organisation’s revision of the International Classification of Diseases, and is also principal investigator of the 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 further develop 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 Pangaea offering to help scientists and clinicians transform currently mundane and manual processes so they can focus on their core aspects of 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 the applications 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 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 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 network 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.”