by Peter High, published on Forbes
9-28-15
Mike Capone is the chief operating officer of the largest technology company founded in New York by market capitalization – Medidata Solutions, which is a $400 million revenue company that provides cloud-based solutions for life sciences companies. Though new to the industry when he joined the company a year ago, he joined with a deep background in technology, having been the first ever Global CIO of ADP, in product development, having run that function at the global human capital management company. He also has a passion for health issues both personally and professionally, both of which led him to Medidata Solutions, where, as he notes in this interview, he felt he could change the world. This opportunity also put him squarely in the middle of the growing technology scene in New York City.
(This is the 25th article in the “Beyond CIO” series. To read past interviews with executives at Biogen, American Express, Marsh & McLennan, Aetna, Allstate, and Waste Management, please click this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above and to the left.)
Peter High: Please describe Medidata Solutions’ business.
Mike Capone: Medidata Solutions is the world’s leading provider of cloud software for clinical trials. More than half the clinical trials in the world are powered by Medidata’s platform today.The whole value proposition for Medidata is that we make clinical trials run better.
In today’s world, as you can imagine, there are diseases waiting for cures. There are people with rare diseases who really do not have a lot of hope unless we can come up with new compounds and solutions to help cure these diseases. We help biotech companies and pharmaceutical companies bring drugs to market faster, ensure their trials are run the correct way, and provide for a solution to help them get better submissions to the FDA so there are no data quality problems with things that could derail it.
Conversely, we actually help bad drugs fail faster. You do not want to keep making investments in compounds that are not going to make it. Our technology helps pharmaceutical companies get better insight into how their drugs perform in a trial and make faster decisions.
High: Can you talk about the role that information and data analytics play in all of this?
Capone: Like most companies, we started out as a transaction company, a data capture for clinical trials. We made a horrible paper process a lot better. As the technology has gotten better, as our platform has picked up more clients and we have gotten more and more information, we have transformed into much more of an analytics company. So now, not only are we able to help facilitate clinical trials by making sure that all of the data capture and all of the technology is there to make the trial run smoothly. Now we are able to build out analytics to actually support better decision making in trials, as well as benchmark.
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