SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Verana Health, the technology company assembling the largest clinical databases in medicine to accelerate research, today announced four key additions to its leadership team: Marie-Eve Piche as Chief Financial Officer, Hylton Kalvaria as Vice President of Strategic Partnerships, Karim Damji as Head of Product, and Ron Cantrell as Senior Director and Principal Data Scientist. The company continues to source exceptional individuals from the strongest organizations in healthcare and technology. Piche, Kalvaria, Damji and Cantrell bring significant experience to the Verana Health team to aid the company’s strategic expansion.
- Piche has nearly two decades of finance experience and spent over 10 years in key financial roles at major subsidiaries of General Electric. After GE she moved to scaling rapidly-growing technology companies such as Pymetrics and AppNexus, where she helped grow revenue by more than six times over the course of her tenure and served as part of the team that drove the $1.6B acquisition of AppNexus by AT&T.
- Kalvaria joins Verana from Flatiron Health, where he founded, built and led the West Coast business, representing half of Flatiron’s commercial activity. Kalvaria previously held a variety of roles at Genentech and was appointed to lead a CEO-sponsored initiative focused on identifying emerging sources of real world data and utilizing those data across the Genentech organization. That initiative led to Roche’s initial investment in Flatiron.
- Damji brings decades of product leadership experience to Verana. He most recently led product at Saama, where he launched solutions for the life science industry including the award-winning Life Science Analytics Cloud (LSAC), named one of PM360’s Most Innovative Products of 2017. LSAC was the impetus for Frost & Sullivan’s recognition of Saama with its 2018 Global Enabling Technology Leadership Award.
- Cantrell has over a decade of experience working with and analyzing real world data in the life science industry. He previously served as Principal Data Scientist at Genentech, where he led real world evidence generation across the company’s Ophthalmology portfolio, working with cross-functional teams to apply scientific expertise to real world data. He started his life science career as a methodologist at Eli Lilly.
“Marie-Eve, Hylton, Karim and Ron add a substantial amount of scientific expertise and leadership experience to the rapidly-expanding Verana team that will be crucial to the continued growth and development of our regulatory-grade specialty data platform for ophthalmology and neurology,” said Miki Kapoor, CEO of Verana Health. “With the addition of these healthcare and technology experts, Verana is poised to meaningfully accelerate the rate of medical research for patients, physicians and the entire healthcare ecosystem.”
The additions of Piche, Kalvaria, Damji and Cantrell are a testament to the company’s exponential growth; in the past year, Verana Health hired half a dozen senior leaders from high profile health data and life science companies, including Medidata Solutions, IQVIA, Oracle, Emdeon, and Flatiron Health. Last April, Miki Kapoor was brought on as the company’s Chief Executive Officer, after previously serving the same position at Tea Leaves Health and in senior executive roles at Everyday Health and IMS Health. Other notable hires from last year include Marc Berger (Senior Vice President and General Counsel), Ellenmarie Rhone (Senior Vice President of People and Culture), and Don Butler (Vice President of Life Science, Commercial).
In the coming months, Verana Health will continue to aggressively scale its team to develop new technologies for physicians and the life science industry.
About Marie-Eve Piche
Marie-Eve Piche is Chief Financial Officer at Verana Health. Piche brings nearly two decades of financial management experience in public and fast-growing private companies to the Verana team. Prior to joining Verana, Piche was the CFO of Pymetrics, where she built the financial strategy and capabilities that resulted in a successful Series B fundraising with General Atlantic. Prior to this, Piche spent five years at AppNexus as the Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis where she helped grow revenue by more than six times over the course of her tenure and served as part of the team that drove the $1.6B acquisition by AT&T. Piche started her professional career at General Electric where she spent 11 years holding several key financial roles. This included Head of Finance for NBC Sports and Senior Director for Telemundo. She was selected for the leadership program at GE Industrial and GE Capital.
Piche received her dual MBA from Columbia University and London Business School. She also holds a Master’s in economics from McGill University and a B.Com. from H.E.C. Montreal.
About Hylton Kalvaria
As Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Verana Health, Hylton Kalvaria leads the company’s life science data science delivery and engagement functions. Kalvaria is an industry leader in the use of real world data to accelerate life science innovation, demonstrated over the course of a decade in commercial leadership roles across the consulting, life science, and technology industries. Prior to Verana, Kalvaria founded, built and led Flatiron’s West Coast business, which represented half of Flatiron’s commercial activity. At Flatiron, Kalvaria built enterprise partnerships with life science customers to increase the use of Flatiron’s clinical data across all phases of the drug development lifecycle including commercial, clinical development, medical affairs and outcomes research teams. In addition, he led the development and execution of Flatiron’s clinical trials strategy and go to market approach. Before Flatiron, he held a variety of roles at Genentech, covering all aspects of drug commercialization and was appointed to lead a CEO-sponsored initiative focused on identifying emerging sources of real world data and utilizing those data across the Genentech organization. That appointment directly led to the identification of Flatiron as a high priority partner for the Genentech’s oncology portfolio. Kalvaria was previously a consultant with ZS Associates and began his career in technology.
Kalvaria holds an MBA and Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Duke University.
About Karim Damji
Karim Damji serves as Head of Product at Verana Health, where he is responsible for leading product strategy and development. Damji, a product veteran with a 20 year track record of success, has launched some of the most notable solutions in healthcare and technology. Damji previously led the product, engineering and marketing organization at Saama. His team was responsible for developing Saama’s AI-enabled data analytics solutions and identifying opportunities that led to successful market share growth. Damji worked closely with Saama's solution development and sales teams to expand the company's industry footprint and led the successful launch and adoption of Saama’s solutions in the life science industry, including the Deep Learning Intelligent Assistant (DaLIA) and the award-winning Life Science Analytics Cloud (LSAC). LSAC was named one of the PM360’s Most Innovative Products of 2017 and was the impetus for Frost & Sullivan’s recognition of Saama with its 2018 Global Enabling Technology Leadership Award. Prior to Saama, Damji led software strategy and product management at Plantronics. He also served in leadership positions spanning business development, product management, sales, and network engineering at Cisco, and as founding head of product at Vocera Communications, MobileIron and DiVitas.
Damji earned his Bachelor’s degree in computational and applied mathematics from San Jose State University.
About Ron Cantrell, PhD, MPH
Ron Cantrell leads clinical data science at Verana as Senior Director & Principal Data Scientist. Cantrell has over a decade of experience working with and analyzing real world data in the life science industry. Prior to joining Verana, Cantrell was Principal Data Scientist at Genentech, where he led real world evidence generation across Roche/Genentech’s Ophthalmology portfolio. In this role, he worked with the product development and medical affairs teams to apply scientific expertise to real world data, creating insights to enable better development decisions for treatments that could improve patient care. Cantrell began his career in the life science industry at Eli Lilly, where he worked as a methodologist in the Global Health Outcomes division, covering diabetes, immunology and neuroscience. Before Eli Lilly, he worked with the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia, where he served as the lead epidemiologist evaluating the effectiveness of antiretroviral treatment for HIV patients provided therapy through the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
Cantrell holds a PhD in Epidemiology and a MPH in International Health from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and a Bachelor’s degree in Natural Sciences from Johns Hopkins University.
About Verana Health
Verana Health is a technology company assembling the largest clinical databases in medicine. Verana utilizes this real world data to power clinical and business insights for physicians and life science companies through its regulatory-grade data platform. By activating this vast amount of data, Verana can learn from the collective experience of millions of patients to empower physicians and accelerate research for patients. Learn more at veranahealth.com.
