Helen Kontozopoulos spent the last years of her father’s life as his caregiver, and one of her primary memories from this time is just how difficult it was to access information about new, effective drugs.
“The doctor said, ‘Look, your dad’s having a major issue with the medication for his gout. He’s itching all the time,’” Kontozopoulos recalls. “I felt horrible because my dad kept complaining, and I kept putting creams on, and I felt like, ‘How do I help him?’”
Eventually, the doctor suggested they try a drug that had recently come onto the market. Its impact was significant. “It really helped my dad [during] the last three years of his life,” Kontozopoulos says. “He wasn’t itchy. His gout wasn’t inflamed.”
This experience reinforced to Kontozopoulos, then an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto in the department of computer science, how haphazard the process could be when it came to connecting patients with therapeutics. This led her to launch Odaia, an A.I.-powered platform that provides pharmaceutical companies such as Janssen, Novo Nordisk, and AstraZeneca with real-time commercial insights that enable them to focus their sales and marketing efforts. The ultimate goal? To accelerate the process of getting the right medication to the right patients.
How did caring for your dad influence the way you built Odaia?
Patients need to get therapies. We think doctors know all about these drugs and clinical trials. They really don’t, and they need this information. Sales reps are the ones who go [to doctors] and say, “Hey, there’s been a new clinical trial. This is going to affect other drugs that the patient is using.”
It clicked when I took care of my dad, [the realization] that the doctor doesn’t have all the information, and [we could create] a better journey for a therapeutic from the point of clinical trial [to patient]. Marketing departments in pharma are using us to understand where they should be targeting these drugs. We’re saying, “We can get you data and information about what doctors are doing.” What used to take a sales rep five hours a week to plan takes 15 minutes with us.
What’s your biggest current challenge?
Hesitancy of adoption. There’s that sci-fi craziness that you hear about, and people get really scared. But then you have the practical part where you say, “I couldn’t have looked at thousands of doctors and figured out where I have to go in a territory [without A.I.].” Large pharma companies and a lot of data teams say, “We can handle it on our own.” You can’t do the analytics and targeting, and understand what’s going to happen in six months as a human on your own, even with multiple tools.
What is something that people don’t know about you?
I paint, and I also create generative art. I love art and fashion. My mom’s a seamstress, so I think that’s where I get it from.
The Fortune Founders Forum is a community of entrepreneurs chosen by Fortune’s editorial team to participate at the annual Brainstorm Tech conference, which took place in Deer Valley, Utah, in July. Our inaugural cohort was selected based on a variety of factors, including the potential impact of their companies, and reflected a diversity of geographies, sectors, and demographics.
