15 minutes with: Charlie Paterson

What is your background and what brought you to PA?

I’m a physicist by background and started my career in the UK National Health Service (NHS) as part of the graduate management trainee scheme, and then became manager of trauma orthopaedics at one of London’s largest hospitals. When some consultants began to work with the hospital, I was really impressed by their approaches, and the way they used analysis and evidence to make good decisions. I wanted to elevate my impact at a larger scale to benefit more people and saw consulting as a way to help think more broadly than solving minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, and day-to-day problems.

I’ve now been at PA for 12 years. Today, I lead PA’s work in clinical trials transformation, which is all about getting new treatments into the hands of patients as quickly and as safely as possible. I blend my background in science and hospital administration with an understanding of the broader healthcare ecosystem to make sure all the constituent parts play well together, and we have as frictionless a process as possible to demonstrate the effectiveness of new therapies. Some of the clients I work with are looking at cutting-edge drugs in the oncology space, with great potential to impact people with cancer.

What’s different about PA?

Our real differentiation is end-to-end innovation. We have a global view of the markets we work in and are actively developing products, both digital and physical, for use in healthcare settings. We bring our clients deep insights; we don’t say “buy X, and you’ll be fine”. We’re able to be much more active in developing solutions that best meet the needs of our clients, and the patients that they serve.

For example, we really understand the context our clients operate in and how therapies will be delivered, right down to human factors such as how an injector might work, how it might be sourced and procured and how its effectiveness will be measured and monitored. We have teams operating across the spectrum. We’re active on the hospital system side too, so have a great depth of understanding about what good looks like. We connect it all to make sure that the solutions we propose are going to work.

Using our strong industry relationships, we take advantage of new capabilities as soon as they drop, developing custom solutions for clients that are far more advanced than leading off-the-shelf products. Off-the-shelf solutions have to be sold and configured for each individual client’s needs, which can take years – on top of the time the organisation takes to decide to invest. We deploy small agile teams who develop in sprints, leading to much quicker value for clients.

How would you describe your job to someone you’d just met?

My role has become easier to describe because, during COVID-19, the development of drugs really came to the fore. People understand that when you’re creating a new drug, you need to do very safe experimentation to understand who the drug will most impact, how to deliver it safely, and how to mitigate risk for people taking it. My work focuses on the whole range of experimentation from the early stages of development through to getting the drug out of the lab and into people’s hands.

This includes finding people who might benefit from the drug and attracting them to studies, and setting up the infrastructure around the trial including the systems used, how things are recorded and monitored, efficient supply chain management, participant engagement, and regulatory submissions.

How has your role changed over time?

I joined the NHS because I wanted to use my energy to make things better for people. Throughout my career, I’ve moved along the value chain from the healthcare side, to the scientific discovery side, to now helping the delivery of new therapies at a much larger scale. In the NHS, I was very focused on hospital efficiency, improving front line emergency care, and reducing emergency admissions. I helped hospitals think about operating room and emergency room efficiency, and embedded performance improvement programs. It meant looking at how hospital systems, perhaps in a whole region or country, interact for better outcomes.

When I joined PA, I moved from being in an individual department in an individual hospital trying to make things better for an individual patient on that one day to thinking about how millions and millions of people access therapies. In 2017, I transitioned from PA’s London headquarters to Boston, US, and became much more involved in using healthcare data to improve service delivery. 

Coming from a technical background, I started to understand more about how systems and data might be used. At the same time, an emergence of new tools and technologies have enabled us to do so much more with that data. In the clinical trials space, blending this knowledge of how healthcare is delivered from an operations perspective, and how the data is collected and managed enables me and my teams to really help organizations to design and deliver more efficient studies that leads to the creation of new therapies.

What's exciting you in your work at the moment?

It’s cliché, but I have to acknowledge AI. So many of the platforms my teams are building are underpinned by AI. We shape product and model development for some of the top 50 companies in the world, which have privileged positions with leading AI players. And then, because we're the people developing and deploying these tools locally, we meet with our client and the global AI giants to improve response time, try different things, and gain early access to new models. We’re doing things that have never been done before. So of course, that is exciting.

All that said, AI is a tool. What I’m really excited about is the shift in public perception that’s going to drive even faster advancements in medicine. We recently surveyed 2,000 US consumers to understand their attitudes to clinical research, finding that two-thirds of people would be comfortable sharing their health data with researchers to accelerate the development of new treatments or cures, and for this data to be shared across trials. Once someone joins a trial, they’ve made a commitment to advance science by sharing their data.

We now have the tools, technologies, and public willingness to connect data more effectively, taking advantage of the opportunity to bring clinical research closer to the path of care and closer to patients in their homes, ultimately accelerating the delivery of new drugs.

How does ingenuity come through in your work?

If I were to try to describe what my clients might say about me, I’m healthily sceptical and able to articulate my cynicism about the market and how solutions are proposed without bias, and with an analytical lens. My combination of technical background and operational experience helps me to detect what is possible and what is perhaps an oversell and I can then help people to figure out their best next steps, even if that leads them in a different direction. It gives me credibility as an advisor, and means clients keep coming back to me to test ideas.

A good example is the arms race of AI in terms of detecting fraudulent submissions in clinical trials. You can now use legacy data to automate the creation and submission of data in a way that’s near undetectable to a human. If you have a site submitting fake data and they get away with it, you could have completely misguided results, and that’s dangerous.

I had a conversation with the leader of predictive analytics at a global pharmaceutical company about different mathematical and human ways to detect this new, futuristic level of fraud. Knowing they have this problem, over the period of a few weeks, I found my mind wandering back to it, and have been starting to test different ideas with colleagues and friends, and we’re now running experiments on how we might solve the challenge.

Can you pinpoint a specific project you’ve worked on where ingenuity really shone through?

One example was working with an organization to develop a groundbreaking therapy for cystic fibrosis patients. Patients can have hugely aggressive treatment regimes that involve hours and hours with nebulizers and other therapies on a daily basis.

These new groundbreaking therapies have now come to market. I’m really proud that it was led by getting close to patients and communities to understand exactly how we could help them, treating them as participants in the research as opposed to study subjects. The sector talks a lot about being patient-centred, and this was a great example of being able to treat people as people, not just patients.

In a more recent example, we’re building a data platform for a large global organisation. It’s hugely rewarding to apply new techniques and solve problems that have never been solved before. We’re exploring how to minimize manual contact with data, and how to identify concerns and safety risks that might jeopardize the outcome of the study near instantaneously. We can start to pinpoint things that previously might have been detected weeks or months after the fact, and would have involved hundreds of hours of plotting, charting, and analysis. 

With the drop in cost of computing power and the increasing capabilities of AI and other techniques, we have been able to develop algorithms that uncover exactly where a therapy is likely to be successful, and flag any risks. It dramatically changes our ability to test and understand the safety and efficacy of new therapies. It’s hugely exciting to think about how that might enable earlier, safer access to life-changing treatments.

What advice would you give to someone who wanted to do what you do?

It’s all about curiosity – not just trying to learn and follow, but really understanding and unpacking. Find something that you are really motivated by. I spend a lot of time digging deep into new modelling techniques, reading new studies that are being released, or listening to industry news and podcasts so I understand what’s going on and can piece together these parts. I’m always trying to get one layer deeper. 

Finding an area you’re curious about is really the main thing. Once you have that spark, you can keep challenging yourself and challenging the thinking around you, and it becomes a lot easier to bring new energy to what you do and to the teams you work with.

What are your key goals for the future?

I want to continue to stay at the cutting edge, develop new things in a safe way with excited and intelligent people, help drugs get to market more quickly, and make sure that what we do helps patients, improves access, and reduces cost.

What are you looking forward to right now?

We’re in such an exciting space with eight of the top 10 biopharma companies in terms of how we help them with clinical trials. We’re building on shifting public perception about how data is used, and the tools we’ve created, to focus on different stages of the development value chain. What I find really powerful is connecting those solutions across the end-to-end chain, because we get to build-in all the different areas. 

Making those links is really powerful, and will offer a step change for the industry as regulation changes and organizations are encouraged to be more open and transparent about the data they use and the results of studies. This space is going to explode with fantastic new ways to personalize medicines that really make a difference to the lives of people around the world.