Ed Ikeguchi
Chief Executive Officer
AiCure
A Modern-Day Polymath
Ed Ikeguchi, MD, has won an Olympic gold medal with the 1984 U.S. Olympic Shooting Team, performed in an off-Broadway production of the musical Comfort Women, engineered and patented numerous medical devices that have undergone the clinical development process, and founded one of the largest technology companies in the clinical research space. So yeah, he can do it all.
In 1999, Ed and Glen de Vries, developed a plan to help the clinical research industry take an evolutionary step forward. At the time, trials were mostly done on paper. Site managers had to fill out lengthy forms, in triplicate, tear out carbon pages, and fax them to pharma companies. These methods were inefficient with countless opportunities for data loss through inaccurate recording or loss of paper records. By moving data collection and storage online and building software that allowed for near real-time edit checking to ensure data was entered correctly, Medidata revolutionized how pharma companies ran clinical trials, and remains one of the world’s leading providers of web-based data management solutions for clinical trials.
More recently, Ed joined AiCure in 2018 as Chief Medical Officer and was named CEO in April 2020. Founded in 2010, AiCure is an AI and advanced data analytics company that monitors patient behavior and enables remote patient engagement in clinical trials. Upon taking the helm, Ed sought to address two key areas: accelerating research use and clinical relevance of AI-driven Digital Biomarkers (DBM) and expanding how the company’s proprietary AI platform could be used by sponsors.
While DBM has existed as a concept for a while, the industry has yet to embrace these markers as mainstream endpoints. To change that, Ed led AiCure to create Open DBM, an open-source solution that allows researchers in pharmaceutical and academic settings alike to access the technology and use it at no cost. While Open DBM just launched in late 2020, 13 universities have used it in projects in just the last couple of months, including for work involved in NIH grant projects.
It is just the latest example of how Ed’s ability to transform himself is also capable of changing a whole industry.
