VIDEO | Ratio Therapeutics CDO: It’s Rewarding to Ingest Disparate Data in a Structured Way

(US and Canada) Jacob Hesterman, Ratio Therapeutics Chief Data Officer, speaks with Kiran Kanetkar, Pendulum Therapeutics VP of Data and Analytics and CDO Magazine Global Editorial Board Member, in a video interview about the role of data and analytics in the radiotherapy industry and the approach to managing multidisciplinary data.

Hesterman describes Ratio Therapeutics as a company developing compounds for targeted radiotherapy that offer efficacy, safety, and toxicity. Speaking about data science application in this context, he says that the early discovery and development phases across various disciplines generate a lot of data not necessarily structured from a data science perspective. He adds that it is rewarding to take disparate data and reports and ingest them in a structured way to make direct comparisons in experiments.

When asked about the impact of the multidisciplinary nature of Ratio Therapeutics on data analytics, Hesterman explains that the company’s mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists focus on scientific discovery and operational delivery. One of the challenges is setting up a data model to store the data across all the different disciplines and making it accessible and usable by people from different backgrounds.

Hesterman notes that the data team communicates with the various groups to understand the critical pieces of data that need indexing and cleaning, ensuring that they are robust and structured.

He shares a couple of his approaches to supporting this multidisciplinary data:  

1. Technology — Use different technical tools to support more type data versus image files or large chemical structures, and integrate them into a traditional relational database.

2. Communication and teamwork— Discuss and understand the pieces of data needed from data sets and ensure formatting and nomenclature standardization. 

Next, Hesterman speaks about the change in data requirements in the journey from early drug discovery to the late phase of development. He explains that it comes back to capturing data points that can be extracted efficiently and combined with more nuanced information ad hoc to make scientific decisions. It becomes a matter of increased operational scale to execute the decisions. Hesterman maintains, however, that ensuring the models are capable of storing and managing the data in both paradigms is crucial.

CDO Magazine appreciates Jacob Hesterman for sharing his insights and data success stories with our global community.