If you work with Evaluate, you’ll probably be familiar with our delightful Customer Success team. They’re the people who help ensure that our customers can use our solutions to navigate the pharma landscape, and answer their key questions to help them make the right decisions about their business. One member of this team is Andy Mills, Principal Customer Success Manager who’s been with Evaluate for over three years. I managed to pull him away from speaking to clients for a few minutes to talk AI, translating data into real-world applications, and…peacocks.
- What do you think is going to have the biggest impact on the pharma industry in the next five years?
- What’s the biggest challenge facing pharma and biotech companies at the moment?
- What’s the one piece of advice you would give a biotech CEO?
- Which areas of the industry are you most fascinated by? Why?
- What’s the best thing about your role?
- What’s your favourite drink?
- Tell us an interesting fact about yourself
Probably artificial intelligence (AI). We’re already hearing about it being used in drug development, in trial design, in all sorts of other areas that could potentially benefit drug developers and ultimately patients. It’s only going to become more powerful as it gets more widely implemented. Of course, it’s also scary both professionally and personally – one challenge we’re well aware of from our business is that AI is generally only as good as the data being fed in.
There are always so many unknowns, especially in pharma where so many massive decisions have to be made so far in advance. As the landscape continues to shift towards biologics or cell and gene therapy or other novel drugs or drug platforms, really understanding new markets and their potential is a major challenge. How will the Inflation Reduction Act impact innovation? How will trial costs or development timelines evolve over the next few years? As a CSM at Evaluate, my focus is on trying to help deliver insight that can help make decisions about next steps a little easier.
Maintaining a long term vision is vital, not just in order to plan your pipeline and launch strategies, but also to be adaptable to what the market and the competitive landscape can throw at you. And then of course using data like ours to inform this vision!
In my role I’m often working on commercial data – sales, volume, pricing and so on. What’s really fascinating is when you make that link back to what that means for patients. The potential of something like mRNA vaccines, or novel drugs in oncology and rare diseases to change the lives of patients living with these conditions is really eye-opening. And those are the conversations I enjoy with the people I work with, translating the data we’re using into the real world and improving lives.
Working with so many different people in all sorts of jobs around the life sciences industry, and hopefully supporting them in a small way! The work our clients are doing is so important and rarely does a day go by where I’m not learning.
Coffee. I don’t think I can add anything to that other than that I really love coffee and start looking forward to my next one as soon as I’ve finished drinking each one
I once got attacked by a peacock – does that count? Also, I “enjoy” running marathons – I have my fifth one coming up in a few months’ time in Leeds (home of Rob Burrow if anyone is interested in learning about his battle with MND).