Member Profile: Dr Vibhor Gupta, Co-Founder Pangaea

Dr. Vibhor Gupta

Dr. Vibhor Gupta trained in oncology research and has a breadth of experience in life sciences through his work in industry and academia over the last two decades. Prior to Pangaea, Vibhor started and built the European business for Quantum Secure, which was headquartered in Silicon Valley and was successfully acquired in 2015. Following Quantum Secure, Vibhor served as Senior Vice President of Commercial Strategy and Sales at Seven Bridges Genomics, which was founded at Harvard. Vibhor’s academic career focused on conducting molecular biology studies and building bioinformatics tools and machine learning models with epigenetic, genomic, transcriptomic and clinical trial data in the context of oncology and infectious diseases. Vibhor has access to an extensive global network in the life sciences industry and is regularly invited to speak at international conferences, government funded programs and investment summits. Vibhor currently splits his time between South San Francisco and London. 

Pangaea Data

Pangaea Data (www.pangaeadata.ai) is a San Francisco and London based provider of a novel AI-driven product for characterizing patients by automatically discovering clinically signatures (which clinicians currently ascertain manually) for 4,000 hard-to-diagnose conditions in an evolving, privacy-preserving and scalable manner across 140,000 healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies globally. This capability has clinically proven to discover 22x more undiagnosed, misdiagnosed and miscoded patients; match 5x more suitable clinical trials to patients; discover new insights across rare and hard-to-diagnose conditions; reduce treatment costs by 50% in only 6-8 weeks; save 90% in operational costs and time; and drive sustainable collaborations between the healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry. The founders (Dr. Vibhor Gupta and Prof. Yike Guo) have attracted more than $300 million through their academic research and the company is advised by Lord David Prior (former Chairman of NHS England and Vice Chairman of Lazards), Mr. Andy Palmer (former Head of Systems Integration at Novartis and a prolific serial entrepreneur). Pangaea was recognised as Digital Solution of the Year (across all verticals) by the UK government in 2023 and a top tier co-sell partner of Microsoft globally. The company has published its work in high-impact, peer-reviewed journals and at conferences.

Tell us about how you founded Pangaea Data AI?

Having worked within healthcare and life sciences for over 20 years and built some of the fundamental technical frameworks to manage patient data, we recognised that clinicians were required to manually review patient records to gain insights about patient journeys and disease trajectories. To automate this process, some solutions like natural language processing (NLP) were tried but these were neither scalable nor applicable in the real world given their limitations to pre-empt insights (being looked for) combined with the heterogeneous nature of patient records. With these challenges in mind and the mission to improve patient outcomes, we wanted to build capability which mimics the manual work currently done by clinicians but can be scalable in a privacy-preserving manner. Hence we built Pangaea, which provides a novel product platform combining medical knowledge and the latest principles of AI. 

What have been the biggest challenges in scaling? 

Prior to Pangaea, we have been part of two start-ups, which were successfully acquired in 2010 and 2015 respectively. It’s interesting that the challenges for us at Pangaea are similar and we continue to learn. It’s starting fresh but with useful experience on our side which helps overcome some issues and adapt quickly. In terms of scaling, ensuring that our customer success stories are visible to our target end users is most important. Given our limited budgets and team size, there is only so much we can do ourselves hence the top tier partnership status with Microsoft is very helpful along with international awards and recognitions such as the Digital Solution of the Year award from the UK government. Given the high level of attention and recognition we have received, it has led to a significant increase in the volume of inbound interest from customers. To fulfill this, we have to hire quickly and of high quality to maintain our standards of delivery. Given our academic backgrounds, we have a good talent pool of former and current students, which has been very helpful but we continue to do more as we hire clinicians, engineers and scientists. 

What does the future hold for you?

Our mission with Pangaea is to improve patient outcomes. We plan to recognise this through our vision to deploy Pangaea across pharmaceutical and healthcare providers globally. We have made a start given that we are able to improve outcomes by finding more undiagnosed, misdiagnosed and miscoded patients for 4,000 hard to diagnose conditions across 140,000 healthcare providers in a privacy-preserving and scalable manner. We want to continue building on this especially given the knowledge driven, sustainable model for collaboration which we have created between healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies. Recently released Large Language Models (LLMs) have been a blessing for us and they will help us scale faster and achieve our vision and mission.

Do you have any advice for future founders in your field?

Only one – focus. Please focus on your team, product and customer success stories. In our experiences, they follow in that order during the course of building a company and are equally important. If you can create value for customers through a scalable product and a self sustaining trustworthy team, the rest of the good will come.

On a closing note, what’s the best business book you’ve read?

Stay Hungry Stay Foolish, by Rashmi Bansal