Odgers Berndtson’s Chris Hamilton and Mike Drew, discuss the converging roles of the CTO and CSO in health tech companies and what boards should look for when making these appointments.
Companies across the entire healthcare spectrum are, almost by accident, starting to look a lot like tech companies. Artificial intelligence, deep learning, and analytics now play pivotal roles in everything from drug discovery and development to genomics and precision medicine. Even the more patient facing fields of healthcare – whether it’s symptoms checkers or nutrition measuring companies – are all increasingly ‘tech first’.
This convergence between science and technology isn’t limited to just clinical development. Patient recruitment, patient communications, the collection of hard and soft data, measuring patient outcomes, and building real world evidence rely more and more upon a company’s technology capabilities. At the same time, a younger generation of tech-savvy and health-conscious consumers, are driving demand for tech innovation in healthcare. What’s more, their spending habits are digitally oriented, creating a bourgeoning market where science is driven by tech.
For chief science officers (CSO) and chief technology officers (CTO), this is having a profound impact. Historically, these roles were distinct, only coming together at critical points in the development of a product or platform.
Their backgrounds were also very different – the CSO often coming from a purely biomedical background and the CTO coming from one of the Silicon Valley goliaths. But in the last ten years these roles have become almost symbiotic, their responsibilities increasingly overlapping, and the requisite experience often being one and the same.
Both roles now need a comprehensive understanding of artificial intelligence and deep learning, particularly where drug discovery and development is concerned. Leading companies now use AI-driven drug discovery platforms in the search for treatments for cancers, hereditary arthritis, and Alzheimer’s, to name just a handful of diseases.
Rather than the highly-fragmented and often ‘hit and miss’ drug development of previous decades, AI is capable of cross-referencing mountains of published literature with medical data in seconds. In fact, a recent survey by analytics firm GlobalData found that AI is set to save billions of dollars by speeding up drug discovery and success rates. For CTOs and CSOs, AI and deep learning, and its application to everything from biological datasets to wearable devices, is a must have skill.
The current crop of CTOs are likely to have the upper hand when it comes to these technologies, by virtue of the tech companies they will have gained experience in. But over the next decade we anticipate a new breed of CSO, who’s scientific background will include extensive us of AI and deep learning.
Data aggregation, acquisition, and analytics is another core skillset the modern CSO and CTO will need in abundance. In particular, taking the current scientific understanding of diseases, converting that to data, interpreting it, and using it to model potential treatments will be part and parcel of their roles in the next five to ten years.
But the understanding of data goes beyond treatment development. It will guide regulatory submissions, influence pricing strategy, and market access discussions, and enable the sales function. Gaining access to and using data from government health systems will also be fundamental to the CTO and CSO roles. In healthcare, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that a company’s competitive advantage is defined by its ability to digest and use data – the CTO and CSO will be intrinsic to this.
As a result of technological acceleration, life sciences and healthcare are on the verge of redefining how medicine is developed and how patients interact with health technology more broadly. Access to care is being streamlined. Patients and caregivers are more empowered when it comes to the type of care and accuracy of information they receive. And wearables and real-time digital monitoring are driving changes in patient behaviours that will offer huge opportunities in the future.
At the same time, innovations in everything from clinical trial modelling to gene therapy are dramatically changing the healthcare landscape. Current and future CSOs and CTOs will need to be visionary thinkers to take advantage of the breakthroughs being made. To ensure market competitiveness they will need to be ambitious in transforming the way their companies use digital technology. And they will need to be capable of convincing their CEOs and their teams to follow them on that journey.
With the lines between science and technology blurring, the lines between the CSO and the CTO are also blurring. This will undoubtedly pave the way to a closer partnership between the roles, and maybe even a fully integrated remit. It’s almost certain that in the near future, we’ll see life sciences companies filling both roles instead of one or the other. Many large biopharma companies have already adapted to this and brought their tech leadership capabilities in-house. And some tech companies are starting to bring biopharma experience in-house.
In these types of arrangements, the more influential of the two leaders often depends on how involved in AI the company is. At the same time, other companies are using external partnerships to drive tech innovation, relying on their CSOs to oversee the shift to digital technology.
What’s clear, is that at the core of both these roles will be a blend of deep scientific understanding and the ability to use technologies like AI, deep learning, and data analytics.
