Member Article

Sarah Beeby joins Clinithink to champion its life sciences business

Sarah Beeby has joined Clinithink as Senior Vice President of Life Sciences where she will be responsible for introducing new technology, in particular AI, to Lifescience projects.

Sarah has over two decades of experience in the global life sciences space and brings a wealth of experience in life sciences having worked in a range of diverse roles. Sarah also has a wide range of operational, therapeutic and regulatory expertise with a focus on collaborative working opportunities to enhance delivery and patient experience. Sarah’s experience as a management team member at exec and board level has covered investment, strategy and operational efficiency and delivery of products and services.

Prior to joining Clinithink Sarah was MD of Synexus and, utilised technology and collaborative working relationships to enhance delivery, profitability and the patient experience in research. She was also pivotal in negotiating a contract between Synexus and the Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. Together they established the North East Clinical Research Centre at Hexham General Hospital; a particular exciting partnership as it was the first of its kind between a private company and the NHS.

Discussing the new role Sarah said: “We hear a lot about the potential of technology and how disruptive technology can bring about a host of benefits. Often, however, there is a disconnect between what is possible and what the market needs. I am really excited to join Clinithink as they are at the forefront of what is possible. Recently our software helped achieve a GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS title in partnership with the Rady Institute for Genomic Medicine for the ‘Fastest genetic diagnosis’ by successfully compressing the time needed to diagnose rare genetic disorders in newborns through DNA sequencing. Not only did this exciting project prove the value of our technology, the humbling reality is that this work can help save the lives of children with rare diseases. That really isn’t a bad day at the office.”

Clinithink’s patented CLiX natural language processing (NLP) solution was needed for two key activities in the process: quickly combing through electronic medical records to extract crucial phenotype information to then compare with over 12,000 phenotypes (plus an additional 15,000 synonyms) describing the characteristics of thousands of rare diseases. The solution can perform both of these tasks in seconds compared to the hours or days it would take a highly skilled specialist physician to do.

Narrative data is a valuable asset in healthcare but is largely inaccessible due to its lack of structure as existing technologies rely on structured data or key word searches. CLiX can ‘read’ thousands of clinical documents an hour and extract the information they contain. This has significant benefit, as shown with the Rady collaboration, in the clinical setting and is also very powerful for clinical trials as it can optimize the development process along the entire continuum – site selection, protocol optimization and enrolment. In simple terms our software can automate the bulk of pre-screening and site feasibility which is still undertaken manually. By targeting very specific patient inclusion/exclusion criteria, even down to specific start and stop events, varying dose levels and thousands of other variable criteria software can be used to speed up clinical trials.

Sarah Beeby, continued: “As well as being an incredibly empowering project to be involved with it also enabled us to put CLiX through its paces and be even more confident in its ability. By using CLiX in the clinical trial setting we can offer significant de-risking for the program and potentially significant savings in development time by decreasing the total enrolment time, reducing protocol amendments, improving data robustness for the next development stage. As we all know time is a big factor with a significant number of trials failing to meet enrolment timelines.”

Clinithink CEO, Chris Tackaberry said: “Sarah has huge experience in the life science industry and we are really excited that she has chosen to join Clinithink as the executive leading our life science business. We are confident we can make a real difference in this space and have already seen exciting traction since Sarah has joined us.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by VPR .