Health Tech
Empowering professionals with autonomy
Benjamine Liu, CEO & Co-Founder, TrialSpark
Empowering professionals with autonomy
“An organization will only be as great as the people you partner with,” says Benjamine Liu, CEO & Co-Founder, TrialSpark – a technology company that runs clinical trials for pharma and biotech companies. Ben believes in hiring the best talent, setting clear goals, and then empowering people with the autonomy they need to achieve these goals. The best organizations encourage people to partner with others from diverse backgrounds so they can assemble teams with different perspectives and insights. At the same time, it’s important that these teams are united by a common mission and values. For TrialSpark, the mission is to bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently by reimagining clinical trials.
Passion taking the plunge
Ben’s work with Sir Simon Lovestone’s lab at Oxford helped him realize that long timelines and exuberant costs, which can add up to hundreds of millions of dollars per trial, are a huge bottleneck in bringing new treatments to patients. His passion to break this bottleneck propelled him to build TrialSpark. TrialSpark is a technology company that runs end-to-end clinical trials more efficiently. TrialSpark has scaled a network of sites by partnering with doctors to create clinical trial sites within their existing practices. They run clinical research out of these doctor practices using a team of clinical research coordinator who are supported by software, data, and technology. By decreasing the cost and time of clinical trials, TrialSpark wants to help the industry to test and bring new medicines to the market faster.
“By creating trial sites with doctors, TrialSpark reaches the 98-99% of patients who have never been exposed to trials, boosting recruitment and enrollment rates. More importantly, our model enables patients to participate in clinical trials with their existing doctor, democratizing access to investigational medicines,” Liu expresses.
Full-stack approach to solving problems
The healthcare market is challenging to break into because of long sales cycles. This often results in companies that focus on point solutions for specific problems that overlook the fundamental issues. To prevent this, Ben encourages companies to pursue full-stack approaches to elucidate problems.
“In healthcare, there are often local optimizations that exist in the market that benefit incumbents, but subsequently create a macro-misalignment of incentives. Full-stack solutions can begin to align these incentives, creating drastically more efficient solutions. However, these solutions often take longer to implement so as a founder, it’s important to create a roadmap for your team to take a more ambitious, full-stack approach,” Ben explains.
Fail fast, fail forward!
To Ben, asking the existential questions first is one of the most powerful ways to make meaningful progress in your project. This allows you to fail fast. “It is your job to create a culture and environment that empowers your team to fail fast to find the next angle to solve a particular problem. By asking existential questions first, you enable the organization to disprove or prove out a hypothesis faster and maximize your learning rate,” says Ben.
Ben is a leader who truly enjoys managing his people thoughtfully. When asked about what he is most proud about, he replied, “The team that we’ve built and how dedicated they are about making a difference in the lives of patients – they challenge me to continue to elevate my game and ensure we are true to our mission.”
Managing time in style
Ben is an early riser. He wakes up at 5:45 am every morning and spends the first 30 minutes of the day catching up on biopharma news. About 20% of his day is spent on internal meetings, 30% on hiring, 30% on business development, and the last 20% on strategic planning. “Throughout all of this, the most important thing is humility and active listening — this is key to effective leadership,” explains Ben.
Message for the young entrepreneurs
Ben advises entrepreneurs to pick a problem that they really fundamentally care about and then set a long-term vision. It is so much easier to stay resolute in solving a challenging problem when you are inherently passionate about it.
“My advice would be to work on a problem that you really care about,” Ben shares.
You should always ask yourself whether this is a problem you would be happy to devote 10 years of your life towards,” he adds.
Top 50 Healthcare Technology CEOs Of 2020
Health Tech
Viruses: Biological versus Computer
By Mark Webb-Johnson, Chief Technology Officer of Network Box
During this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, those of us working with computer viruses continue to be amazed at the similarities between the techniques used by the medical community to fight SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease) and the processes involved in our electronic anti-virus systems. Let’s look at some of these similarities, and see how computer anti-virus researchers help protect.
By Mark Webb-Johnson, Chief Technology Officer of Network Box
What is the Virus?
SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus. Essentially, a strand of information wrapped up in a protective shell and a mechanism to infect cells – information, envelope, infection mechanism.
By comparison, a computer virus consists of the payload, a carrier, and an exploit mechanism. For example, the payload would be the malicious code, the carrier an email message, and the exploit mechanism something to take advantage of a vulnerability in a particular mail client. Another example would be script downloaded from a web page, taking advantage of a web browser exploit.
Replication
The virus’s primary purpose is to replicate – to make copies of itself. SARS-CoV-2 does this by infecting cells (in the lungs, stomach, and other areas of the human body), then using the cell’s own mechanisms to make copies of its RNA and make new virus particles.
Computer viruses have the same primary purpose of replication. They want to infect as many hosts as possible. Once in a computer system, they make multiple copies of themselves and transmit out to new hosts. It is this self-replication capability that defines this as a virus.
Identification and Testing
The gold standard for identifying viruses is the whole genome sequence. This maps the full sequence of the chemical components of the RNA (made up adenine, uracil, guanine, and cytosine; abbreviated as A, U, G, and C), and results in a very long string of these four letters. That is excellent for precise identification, but not so good for testing. Due to mutations, what we know of as SARS-CoV-2 is actually a collection of hundreds of different strains of the same fundamental virus, each with their own slightly different sequences (more on this later).
To test for the virus, researchers instead concentrate on relatively small portions of the full sequence. This way, they can extract samples from a potentially infected human, amplify the RNA in the sample to obtain enough to test with, and then compare that against the portion of the full sequence. That is the RT-PCR test.
Computer virus researchers work similarly. The payload of the virus itself is a sequence of computer code that can be expressed in binary, or more commonly in hexadecimal notation. Computer viruses are often intentionally self-encrypted and randomized (we call these polymorphic viruses) to avoid whole sequence detection. Nowadays, these are by far the most common form of computer virus seen.
Researchers extract portions of the sequence that don’t change and use pattern matching techniques to detect those partial sequences in suspicious samples. We call these ‘signatures,’ and they can be effectively used to detect known viruses in suspicious samples.
Immune Response and Vaccination
The human immune system has a component known as the ‘adaptive’ immune system. The system works by identifying portions of viruses already in the body, and creating antigen-specific cells designed to identify, remember, and attack that specific antigen. These cells protect against future infections of the same virus and can survive in the body for some time (months, or years, typically). This is why after you’ve had the measles once, for example, you usually don’t get it again. Vaccinations work by purposely injecting the body with antigens that will generate such an adaptive immune response, to protect you from future specific infections.
Computer anti-virus systems store databases of signatures of known viruses. When your computer receives a new file, it can scan it, look for a match against those signatures, and take action if a match is found (quarantine, etc.). Such signature-based systems are the computer equivalent to the body’s adaptive immune system.
Innate Immune Response
Another component in the human immune system is known as ‘innate.’ This system can detect what is not ‘you’ (what is ‘foreign’) and attack the invader. It relies on the antigen’s chemical properties and doesn’t need to have previously seen that specific antigen.
For computer anti-virus, this is extremely hard to achieve well. The capability to detect and block previously unknown viruses is what differentiates good anti-virus systems from the poor. Various techniques are used, but mostly revolve around a) decoding the virus code to the rawest form, b) detecting suspicious encoding or exploit behavior, and c) using emulation or sandboxing techniques to see what the virus does when executed. Looking at behavior, rather than code sequences.
Mutations and the Future
RNA viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 are very poor at accurate replication, and sometimes the copies made are not perfect. Base pairs get flipped. Portions of the sequence are lost. Parts of other viruses are incorporated. Before long, you are dealing with bad copies of bad copies of a bad copy. It is like the story of a million monkeys with a million typewriters, eventually producing the works of William Shakespeare. Sometimes these viral mutations are beneficial to the virus, but most often not. Whatever the outcome, these mutations are the way the virus adapts to further its goal of replication.
Thankfully, we do not see the same with computer viruses. A computer virus can and does make perfect copies of itself, 100% of the time. Sure, we have self-encrypting polymorphic computer viruses, and randomizing fragments are often introduced, but the core code of the virus is not changed, and certainly not randomly. Perhaps in time, we will see this, but with today’s non-forgiving computer CPU architectures, it is unlikely to be a successful approach.
Of course, given enough monkeys and enough typewriters, anything is possible. Perhaps they can even improve on Shakespeare. Before that day comes, however, make sure you are prepared. Subscribe to a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP) that can adapt, and protect you from cyber threats.
