Glen de Vries, co-founder and President of Medidata Solutions, a Manhattan-based life sciences technology company specializing in the collection and management of clinical trials data, recently endowed a student fellowship at NYU’s Center for Data Science. The Glen de Vries Permanent Fellowship Fund will provide tuition assistance to one student each year in the CDS master’s program at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. De Vries received a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology and genetics from Carnegie Mellon University, and briefly, was a graduate student at the Courant Institute with an interest in probabilistic algorithms.
Medidata: Medi- for medical and -data for data
In 1994, Glen de Vries and Ed Ikeguchi, a urology resident at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, created OceanTek, a startup developing Web applications for clinical trials and the precursor of Medidata Solutions. In 1999, they closed OceanTek and together with a third partner, Tarek Sherif, founded Medidata Solutions, now the largest tech company founded and still headquartered in NYC, and the leading global provider of cloud-based solutions for clinical research. Ikeguchi has since moved on, de Vries is President and Sherif is CEO.
In just 14 years, Medidata Solutions’ success has been nothing less than astounding. Its pioneering platform, the Medidata Clinical Cloud™, is now used by more than 350 life sciences companies, including 90% of the Top 25 global pharmaceutical companies. With a staff of over 900 employees, Medidata Solutions has offices in the US, the UK and Japan. Yet perhaps no one is more astounded at this phenomenal growth than the co-founder himself. Says Glen de Vries, “Yes, I find it pretty hard to believe as well.”
Precisely what Medidata Solutions does so extraordinarily well is “connect doctors, nurses, clinical trial professionals—whose job it is to make sure everybody’s being compliant with regulations—and just recently, the patients themselves,” Glen explains. “When you do all that on paper, it’s really tedious. Even if you’re able to do a good job, it’s going to cost a huge amount of time and money. Here at Medidata, there are ways we can do it much more efficiently, and that’s just the beginning of the kind of value we bring to people.”
“I have the best job in the world.”
Yet the most compelling, most invigorating thing about Glen de Vries is not how successful his company has become but how much he so clearly enjoys his work, evident in the passion with which he describes Medidata’s achievements. “I have the best job in the world,” he states, “and the reason I say that is because every time we help one of our customers conduct a better clinical trial, it means they get through that process faster. Maybe they realize a drug doesn’t work, or doesn’t work in certain people. They can then divert their attention sooner to something that does work so that people get those therapies or treatments faster. I get to do that on an incredible scale.”
What excites him most, he says, is that given the thousands of medical indications that are enormously relevant to the people who suffer from them, instead of working at a lab bench on just one of them, Medidata Solutions can affect outcomes for all of those people by changing the way the pharmaceutical, biotech, medical devices and all of life sciences work. “Our ultimate mission is to get to better outcomes,” he says. “Technology should lead to better outcomes.”
Key influences: his mom, his dad, EF Hutton and the tango
When Glen was in high school, his mother thought he should learn to dance, so she gave him ballroom dance lessons as a graduation gift. Years later, that led to his association with Dancing Classrooms (he’s Chairman of the Board), an international non-profit that teaches ballroom dancing to schoolchildren, but more importantly, instills poise, self-confidence, acceptance of others and mutual respect. He still loves to dance—yes, the tango but many others as well.
As well as introducing him to ballroom dancing, Glen’s mother was an important influence in terms of feeling entrepreneurial and starting Medidata Solutions, he recalls. After she divorced his father, she started a PR company out of their Manhattan apartment. Often when Glen would come home from school, someone would be working in the dining room. When that became three people working full time, his mother moved the business to a proper office. Her courageous entrepreneurial spirit, he now realizes, was a major inspiration for his future career.
Glen’s father was also a significant business influence. “He worked at EF Hutton and when I wasn’t in school, I would go to his office,” he remembers. “One day, we were in the elevator with EF Hutton’s Chief Information Officer and my dad says to the guy, ‘My son is really into computers.’ And the man answers, ‘That’s great! Glen, if you want to come see our computer rooms, I’d be happy to take you on a tour.’ And at 10 years old, I got this incredible tour from this guy—for no other reason than that was the kind of company it was. It was super pivotal in my life and super important in terms of how we think of Medidata as having a non-rigid structure where everybody can interact and collaborate.”
The secret to Medidata’s success? Perseverance.
Not that it’s all been smooth sailing at Medidata Solutions. The first big client, the “sale” that really got the ball rolling, almost didn’t happen. In 2004, Glen and his team were giving a sales presentation to a large California biotech company. The first day went great. However, the next day’s presentation bombed. A Medidata employee spilled an enormous mug of coffee on the Chief Information Officer, then the demo failed. After an impassioned meeting in the parking lot, the team decided to try again. They told the company they’d fixed the problem that had interfered with the demo, then sent them everything they needed to simulate a clinical trial. “In essence, we gave them the keys. They turned on the engine, took it for a test drive, liked it, and bought the system. So that was another important life lesson. Never give up!”
A brief stint at the Courant Institute led to endowing a student fellowship
“I always thought I was going to be a scientist,” Glen says. “For a while it was a physicist, then a chemist, then a biologist. But always an ‘ist.’ Then I decided I wanted to pursue Medidata, but I still had this ‘ist’ thing in my mind. It was 1999, the early crazy days of Medidata, and I said, ‘I’ll do something more relevant to the computer work that we’re doing. I’ll get a degree in computer science. Courant’s right down the street and it’s a great school.’ I applied, got in, and for six months, tried to juggle the two. And it just was impossible. Happily, because we kept looking at Courant as an interesting source of candidates and a terrific place to collaborate with, we kept up the relationship.” He adds, “In fact, we have a couple of people here whose first job after graduating from Courant was Medidata Solutions.”
Glen then heard of NYU’s plans for the Center for Data Science. Around the same time, he and his staff were asking themselves if there was something that could be done with all the data they were collecting that would make it more valuable to the world. “What we realized,” he says, “was, ‘Yes, we think there is.’ Instead of compiling data from 200 clinical trials a year, like a typical pharmaceutical company does, we’re doing thousands, because we’re doing it with 350 companies. So we started to look at how we could aggregate information across our customers and package that aggregate information in a way that would help them get drugs to market faster, more efficiently. We realized that this was a great position to be in, and to be able to turn this information into actionable knowledge really would work.”
It was this convergence of Medidata Solutions becoming more and more focused around data science along with the founding of the Center for Data Science that led to Glen’s recent $275,000 gift to NYU, establishing the Glen de Vries Permanent Fellowship Fund. “It all just made sense,” he says. “I saw this as a perfect opportunity to really help the Center for Data Science build from the ground up, which is a pleasure to do personally, as well as a great opportunity for Medidata and Courant to figure out how to collaborate on creating great research opportunities for professors and experience opportunities for graduate students. And what a great value for the world, because every time we figure out a way to make life sciences work better, we’re helping our parents, children, siblings and ourselves.”
Glen is now eagerly looking forward to seeing the impact of the next generation of data scientists’ work, and what this will mean to the life sciences and society at large. And as members of that society, all of us will get to share in that beautiful dance as well.
By ML Ball