30 Best CEOs of the Year 2020 30 Best CEOs of the Year 2020 | Page 58

Strategikon Pharma: A Pioneer in Changing
the Landscapes of Clinical Study
“Our vision is to modernize the pharma business and make it compatible with what the new generation of ‘millennial’
demands: information at their fingertips.”
I
t is well known that clinical
trials are critical to the pharma
industry because they are part of
the regulatory path to bringing new
life savings therapies to patients.
According to industry statistics,
over $60b are spent annually in
outsourced R&D, a large portion
for clinical trials. What may be less
known is that the majority of clinical
studies are planned and budgeted
manually and outsourced using rigid,
inefficient procurement templates
and bid grids.
This scenario presented itself
as opportunity for Strategikon
Pharma.
There is constant need to strive for
efficiency in drug development, and
Strategikon is one such solution
provider that has replaced multi-tab
Excel sheets of formulas with elegant
software for clinical study planning,
budgeting, and re-forecasting.
Strategikon Pharma is a California
based company founded in 2016,
developing software applications for
clinical trial business management.
The company launched its
breakthrough software platform,
Clinical Maestro, in 2019, with
impressive market reception.
In Conversation with
Anca Maria Copaescu,
Strategikon Pharma CEO
Why was the company set
up? How did you expand your
company and its offerings
over the years?
Strategikon is growing very rapidly,
but I hope it will preserve the
startup culture for the years to come.
I like to say that the company was
born out of “love and frustration.”
The love part is the easy one: all
the founders are passionate about
bringing about change through
efficiency and innovation. The
frustration part grew slowly over
time, having to perform nearly all
activities related to clinical study
business operations in Excel in a
highly tedious manner; one of the
most frustrating elements of working
in the status quo environment is
the inability to access information
quickly and extract intelligence out
of the company’s data trove.
Strategikon’s product, Clinical
Maestro, is an efficiency platform
that replaces Excel for clinical trial
planning and outsourcing with
collaborative software. The name
reflects its philosophy: harmonious
process integration. Today the
industry operates in silos, using
point software solutions, and the
journey from the clinical study plan
to budget to execution is a long
and arduous one. Clinical Maestro
“makes music” out of previously
disconnected processes– the
instruments that enable clinical trial
business management.
What were the biggest initial
hurdles to building your
business, and how did you
overcome them?
The initial hurdles were establishing
the market fit: is there a real need
to modernize clinical trial business
infrastructure? There is a lot of push
to maintain the current processes,
the mentality “if ain’t broke, don’t
fix it,” which preserves large scale
inefficiencies. The anti-change Status
Quo has been and will continue to be
a challenge not only for Strategikon
but for any disruptor. We are tackling
the problem through use cases,
Return-on-Investment analysis, and
Anca Copaescu and Debora Araujo
at the 2019 Clinbiz Summitt
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