Sagar Anisingaraju
Chief Strategy Officer
Saama Technologies
Reimagining the Clinical Trials Ecosystem
For Sagar Anisingaraju, constantly challenging his organization, the people around him, and the industry to dream of things not dreamt of before is a way of life. His deep strategic thinking and acumen to build practical execution models to institutionalize ideas into reality has resulted in several out-of-the-box innovations, time and again.
Sagar’s intuitive understanding of data and analytics to drive business outcomes, and his call to help pharma find its Moore’s Law to reduce drug development costs has resulted in Saama innovating and launching the award-winning Life Science Analytics Cloud (LSAC) in 2017. An industry-defining analytics platform thus took shape for the planning and conduct of clinical trials with unprecedented visibility, capability, and speed. LSAC’s AI-based virtual assistant, Deep Learning Intelligent Assistant (DaLIA), is challenging the status quo of information consumption by pharma across all phases of clinical trials, from Phase I to Late Stage. In developing DaLIA, Sagar’s challenge to his teams was “If Google can tell me when to start for my next meeting, why can’t we leverage similar technology to predict and guide a Study Manager on what to do before patient recruitment fails?”
Sagar’s vision is still unfinished. He is leading the effort for open innovation and collaboration across the pharma ecosystem for data and insights sharing. He challenges his teams and partners towards disorganized innovation, encouraging open work to ensure that the Saama and life sciences industry ecosystems thrive jointly. One example is Saama’s partnership with The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) to enhance operational and clinical conduct of the multi-drug, multi-site precision medicine trials.
Another example is publishing Saama’s strategic transformation journey as Kellogg Business School Case Study to help future entrepreneurs across the world learn and innovate.
“Sagar architected advanced AI work to address some mundane problems that have been experienced but overlooked by pharma during drug development for decades,” says Saama’s Founder and CEO Suresh Katta. “His ideas challenge the status quo to deliver better business outcomes.”
Sagar also advocates a smart work-life balance. An avid golfer, and tennis player, his mantra is, “Be equally enthusiastic on Monday mornings and Friday evenings.”
