.png)
.png)
Member Spotlight: Interview with Dimitrios Skaltsas, Co-Founder of Intelligencia
Dimitrios Skaltsas is Co-Founder & Executive Director of Intelligencia, a technology company that focuses on reducing the risk of drug development with the ultimate goal of bringing novel therapies to patients faster.
Q: Tell us about your company
A: Intelligencia is a NYC based technology company that focuses on assessing and improving the probability of success in drug development. We combine expertly curated, proprietary data with the computational power of AI to quantify and improve clinical success and enhance external innovation.
Our business model provides flexibility for our customers - this may include an all-access option to our intuitive platform, subscription to select modules, and/or periodic bespoke reports. Our platform includes two products:
- Portfolio Optimizer: to assess PTRS (Probability of Technical & Regulatory Success) for novel therapies.
- Breakthrough Science: to identify high potential emerging innovation, trends, areas of research.
Our team has diversity in backgrounds and expertise but shares the same values, which allows us to work together and deliver on our vision of saving lives. We are a mission-driven, diverse, international team - with a 62% women representation across the US and Europe.
Q: What is Intelligencia's greatest achievement so far?
A: We set out to assess in a data-driven way the Probability of Success for novel therapies in clinical development. We have achieved results that exceeded our expectations - specificity and sensitivity of over 80%. And we are fortunate to be working with some of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies to further improve our models. This fuels our determination and excitement to advance and distribute our technology.
Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of biologists, pharmacologists, data scientists, software engineers, bioinformaticians, product development and business functions people has been core to our success and culture.
The InSight Datacube brings together, with state-of-the-art machine learning models and expertly curated ontologies, billions of proprietary and public data points across clinical and preclinical development that produce trusted results.
We have been featured in CB Insights AI startups reinventing healthcare for 2022 and Forbes AI 50 for 2021.
Q: What have been your biggest challenges?
A: Get access to and pull together all the data needed to answer the right questions - some data were easily accessible, some were available but we needed to build data pipelines and clean them up, and some did not exist and we had to build from scratch.
Q: What's Intelligencia's ambition?
A: Use technology to revolutionize drug development for the better with the ultimate goal of bringing novel therapies to patients faster. We want to reduce cost and increase efficiency.
Q: Why did you join the BIA?
A: We joined BIA to be part of a network of leading technology companies in the life sciences space working towards innovative healthcare solutions that truly save lives.
Q: What excites you about the UK life sciences sector?
A: 2021 was a record year for investments, successes and innovation in the UK life science companies as revealed by the BIA report on biotech financing in January. In the next five years, the use of data-driven life science technologies like ours will be pivotal to enabling external innovation, accelerating the development of potential therapeutics, vaccines and diagnostics and making the UK the "third global life science hub". We are excited by the explosion of innovation in the UK digital technology sector and keen to play our part in such a world-leading science, entrepreneurial culture and supportive business and policy environment.
Q: If you could invite any scientist or entrepreneur to dinner, who would it be and why?
A: Dr Ozlem Tureci, co-founder & Chief Medical Officer at BioNTech, is one of those people that align perfectly with the core mission of Intelligencia. She is a scientist and entrepreneur with an extensive background in Immunology and cancer research and is passionate about developing therapies that save lives.