May 7, 2024, 9:57 AM EDT
New advisory board and executive hire bring domain-rich experience to Lokavant
NEW YORK – May 7, 2024 – One year since forming its Advisory Board, Lokavant, the clinical trial intelligence platform company, announces three new members, including Pfizer’s Head of Predictive Analytics Jonathan Crowther. The Lokavant Advisory Board brings together accomplished leaders in pharmaceutical research and development who are experts in global clinical trial operations. They work closely with the Lokavant leadership team, providing valuable insights into drivers for the evolving data and analytics needs of clinical trial sponsors and contract research organizations (CROs). In addition, Lokavant welcomes former Covance executive Aaron Mackey, PhD, as senior vice president of AI and data science.
The following industry veterans are now playing a key role in helping guide important decision-making at Lokavant:
- Jonathan Crowther, PhD, Head of Predictive Analytics at Pfizer
- Otis Johnson, PhD, MPA, Principal Consultant at Trial Equity
- Michelle Everill, CEO & Founder of Michelle Everill Coaching and former Senior Director, Head of Clinical Business Operations at Bristol Myers Squibb
In conjunction with new advisory board members, Lokavant hired executive Aaron Mackey to expand the company’s innovation in data science for clinical research operations. Mackey has held various tenure-track faculty research positions in academia, including the Center for Public Health Genomics at the University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania Genomics Institute. Additionally, Mackey has held various scientific and leadership roles at GlaxoSmithKline, Hemoshear Therapeutics, Covance/LabCorp, Valo Health, and Roivant Sciences. Most recently, he served as vice president of Data & AI/ML at Sonata Therapeutics.
“I am delighted to see Aaron's appointment as a key executive at Lokavant,” said Crowther. Aaron’s deep domain expertise in AI and data science will be instrumental in advancing Lokavant’s transformative technology. His approach to deriving novel insights will propel the company’s efforts to innovate and enhance outcomes in clinical trials. I am excited for the next-level intelligence solutions this team of experts is destined to achieve.”
“Lokavant is a really great fit for me,” said Mackey. “The combination of operational time series data and advanced, prescriptive analytics have tremendous power to fundamentally drive faster clinical research outcomes, surfacing insights using Lokavant’s proactive decision-support tools – not just a static BI dashboard or Excel macro calculator. The Lokavant team shares my vision and my passion for working with sponsors to understand their needs and building out a solution that finally breaks through the noise to speed trials and get medicine to patients faster.”
Despite a growing interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and increased data points, there is still an infrastructure gap. The life sciences industry struggles to harness enough data to fuel AI for practical uses in clinical research. The challenge increases as trials grow more complex and produce more data across more sources, requiring data scientists to aggregate and harmonize these various data sets, each with different lineages, formats, and other variables. In fact, the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development reports the typical late-phase protocol collects an average of 3.6 million data points, three times the volume collected 10 years ago.
Lokavant’s Clinical Intelligence Platform and predictive analytics applications are built with proprietary historical trial data from more than 2,000 studies involving more than 14,000 investigators, 12,000 healthcare institutions, real-world data (RWD) sources, and more than 400,000 third-party trials. The platform enables sponsors and CROs to accurately see real-time trial performance compared to similar studies to optimize decision-making and give sponsors and CROs accurate predictive insights on study feasibility. It has already proven a 70x improvement in enrollment forecast accuracy, over $1 million in cost savings from patient retention, and six months' time savings from detecting site noncompliance issues.
“Clinical study feasibility is mission-critical, especially as trials become increasingly complex, personalized, diverse, and specialized with strict participation criteria,” said Rohit Nambisan, CEO and co-founder of Lokavant. “I’m excited to work with Aaron and the new advisory team to incorporate their learnings into our clinical trial intelligence platform and study feasibility applications. Together, we can drive efficiencies in trial operations while accelerating clinical research.”
About Lokavant
Lokavant provides clinical trial teams with an intelligence platform that improves the time, cost, and quality of trial planning and execution through data-driven analytics solutions. Lokavant's platform aggregates and integrates real-time data from disparate trial data sources and powers advanced analytics enabled by its compendium of proprietary trial data. The suite of applications built on the platform allows study teams to proactively manage their studies and surface insights, driving efficiencies in all scientific and operational use cases. Email contact@lokavant.com to learn more or visit www.lokavant.com.