Sajan Khosla, Executive Director, Head of Real World Evidence, Oncology R&D at AstraZeneca, shared on LinkedIn:
“After what seems like an eternity (11 years) it is time to close another chapter of my time at AstraZeneca.
Many of you will have been more used to seeing what is on the screen of this laptop but not what is on the back of it. Each sticker is an accumulation of experiences that have come with me along my journey within AZ, each one harbouring it’s own story.
Yes, you are right, ‘this isn’t your first time leaving AZ!’. No it isn’t but it is the THIRD! Each one gets harder to absorb. Throughout these years I have been humbled by the incredibly deep talent that we have developed, nurtured and attracted into the Oncology Data Science and AI organisation and know for sure that there is a tremendous opportunity ahead.
There are a few key leaders that have been pivotal in this growth of RWD and AI within Oncology, starting with Susan Galbraith. Without the fierce leadership and inspiring drive for the data science team to drive AI into critical decision making, none of the impact would ever be understood. To Leora Horn and Renee Iacona, whose instrumental guidance and openness to innovation has led to the development and implementation of the integrated view of RWD with clinical trial data, enabling a stress test of decisions at critical development junctures.
Lastly to Iker Huerga who really helped ingrain the design, execution and implementation of this from the start. With more recent examples of how this can be done ‘With AI’ by the development of entire agentic systems that can fan out to run some of these tasks autonomously. And how this can be done ‘Through AI’ to ensure we can leverage some of the best multi-modal foundation models trained specifically on oncology data.
It has been an incredible journey, in some ways the journey has just begun.
I am really looking forward to pioneering the next phase of this especially as AI gets more ingrained into life-sciences and very much looking forward to being part of the RWE domain as it leans into AI. But before I do that, I’ll be taking some time to nurture my thoughts and vision, continuing on my academic journey at UCL, coaching my agents/children, spending time on AI alignment and the imperatives of this for health equity and most of all tending to my garden (yes I chose the right time for this)!
More to come on my musings on AI alignment in health on my LinkedIn posts…I promise not to fill you with ANY slop…”
Read more articles about AstraZeneca on OncoDaily.