Tal Shimshon is staying at Vala!
We solved it, December 2023/Walla system!
Biotechnology Research - and as a result healing - have come out of the use of all our medical information.
How do you do it at the same time as protecting privacy?/ShutterStock
If in the past we could only dream of a medicine that would be able to cure chronic and serious diseases, today it is already clear that the development of technology and the transformation that the field of life sciences is going through around the world, can bring a balm and even a little hope to anyone who hopes that the day will come when the medicine that will help him will be within easy reach.
However, the process of developing new drugs is long and tedious, and clinical trials do not always guarantee the desired result.
A good clinical trial is one that manages to rely on a lot of data and over time, but in practice this doesn't really happen.
Asaf Ibn Haim, an Israeli entrepreneur from Be'er Sheva, whose life rolled him from start-up to start-up until the long-awaited exit, had an idea that succeeded in changing the perception among the major pharmaceutical companies in the US and leading to a huge change in the field of health and life sciences.
In 2007, Ibn Haim founded the company Crossix Solutions (Crosics), the third company he founded, which aims to improve and optimize the database through technology. What does this mean in practice? Providing simple and secure access to pharmaceutical and biotech companies to patient data from the health market and a platform for analyzing the information.
The entrepreneur Assaf Ben Haim, founder of Crusix/PR
Private and anonymous
Ibn Haim's start-up offers a secure data platform, which collects and provides patient data and analyzes it, while strictly maintaining the privacy and anonymity of data, in accordance with the American HIPAA privacy protection regulation.
This is the reason why it is in high demand - both from pharmaceutical companies and from research bodies and health institutions, who can, with the help of the data and insights that emerge from them, make better marketing decisions when reaching the market and improve their results.
When we talk about a database, at least in Israel, we always feel something bad in our stomachs.
How do you really know that privacy is preserved and why does data have a very high advantage?
"Medical data is one of the most interesting things there is, because it is very rich and has a lot of potential. There are two philosophical views here and each country takes it in a different direction, one view says that the information is mine and I as a consumer deserve privacy, this is a very sensitive issue for you Privacy outweighs the other value.
On the other hand, the concept that prevails in the US is a concept that says that there is still privacy and it will be preserved, but if the data is not identified and you reach a situation where the chance of associating it with a known person is very small, there is a huge value to society."
Ibn Haim explains that, unlike the Israeli market And the global market, only in the USA and New Zealand is there a possibility of direct marketing of prescription drugs to the end customer by television advertisements.
It seems strange to us, because here it doesn't happen in television commercials, but through professional articles or PR items.
The disadvantage of advertising a drug is being subject to the marketing agenda of a pharmaceutical company. Against this, it cannot be ignored that this advertising has an advantage Huge, and is direct contact with a customer who has a particular problem and can consult directly with his doctor about something that the doctor may have missed.
"And the same data of hundreds of thousands of Americans helps those companies know how to more accurately reach the market and how to refine the distribution and production system.
And yet there is also very high regulation in the marketing system.
In the advertisement, for example, there must be equal weight between the benefits and the side effects of the drug, the perception on this issue is very accurate and conservative."
In most of the world, clinical trials are relied upon before approving new drugs, and in fact you are pointing here to a completely different perception, which if you think about it deeply in which there is much more logic and precision, certainly when it comes to drugs for complex diseases
"We all know how drugs are approved in a clinical trial.
is random.
Some people get the real drug and some are in the control group and don't get it.
We don't really know who goes where, neither the attending physician nor the person participating in the experiment.
It is also important to note that clinical trials are often conducted on a small number of people, and in most cases it is about people from a certain region, people who are close to a certain source and this does not necessarily always represent the entire population.
And in the end there is a desire to understand how the drug functions in the real market, what happened to people who took it for a long time far beyond a few weeks or months of the clinical trial, and what happens after the drug is released to the market?
The value of these data is tremendous, not only for doctors but also for the patients themselves."
Even in the marketing aspect, Ibn Haim adds enormous value to the end customer.
"As mentioned, it is not only about cholesterol and blood pressure drugs, but drugs for Crohn's and other diseases with very targeted audiences. The power of the data also directs the drug in a marketing way to people who need it, to the fullest potential. To doctors who specialize in this direction or treat in this field and others."
How is your data collected?
"The technology is very sensitive and is installed in a data environment for the purpose of a pharmacy or a hospital. We run it on the data set of the sensitive data environment in that organization in the first step to eliminate any way of personal identification. Then, we need to understand who the patient here is actually who is his patient The data can be collected. And in the last step, the technology removes all direct identifiers in the data, and reduces the resolution of the data so that it will be impossible to identify the person even indirectly."
Despite the tendency to portray pharmaceutical companies as greedy, most of them engage in life-saving research and development/ShutterStock
for the benefit of the public
In 2019 Crusix and Ivan Haim in its head made an exit when the Veeva company purchased them, after Crusix had already captured more than 70% of the data analytics market in the US, in the amount of $550 million, and this after Ivan Haim raised a total of three million dollars with the beginning The company's activities.
The company's employees won the purchase deal with holdings amounting to 120 million dollars, and unlike other entrepreneurs who take the money along with a turn in their lives after the exit, even today, four years later, he remains as CEO of the company and continues to work as usual as CEO of Veeva-Crossix from He is based in New York, where he is responsible for managing one of the most significant growth engines in Veeva.
Crusix currently holds the secure medical information of approximately 300 million Americans. It is this information that has made the former Israeli company one of the most significant growth engines of Veeva worldwide, and this treasure is offered as stated to the life sciences industry for the purpose of promoting and developing medicines and treatments and promoting medical research. It must be said that Viva is the first public company to become a public benefit corporation and it works for the benefit of all stakeholders in the industry (e.g. patients, employees, communities) and not only for the benefit of its investors.
The connection to the health industry came as which always happens in these success stories quite by chance.
Ibn Haim in general drew inspiration from a financial venture and decided to try to take it in the direction of personal health management.
"It was a rather naive idea," he says, "We tried to sell it and approached hospitals and medical insurance companies, but they all told us no. It was too early. Right before the money ran out, we reached out to the pharmaceutical companies. This was exactly the time when they started marketing drugs to consumers in direct marketing, and it was quite a new world for them to start concentrating on the patient instead of campaigners for the doctors. The pharmaceutical companies saw the platform as a means of contacting the customers with the drug that interests them, so for example the drug for multiple sclerosis began to gain momentum, and everything unfolded from there."
Since the exit, Ibn Haim has become one of the most senior Israelis in the technology industry for the field of life sciences, but also from his seat in the USA and a company that is now completely American, its development center was from its first day and remains even after the purchase here in Israel, in Kiryat Ono.
It seems that in the field of health, Start Apim skips the Israeli phase a bit and immediately goes outside
"It seems to me that in general this is true, but for me the story was different.
I founded my first start-up in Israel and in the process I moved to the US to lead its business development. At some point before the IPO I was already in the US and when I decided to start a new company it was already American, but I asked myself the question where I wanted to do the development , and then I met Sa'ar Barhoum, who currently serves as the vice president of the company, and I knew that I could trust him to be able to get this thing up and running in Israel in a good way." Was there a thought to try and
penetrate the Israeli market
as well?
Not aimed at Israel.
The reason I founded the company from the beginning was a challenge and a lack that I realized existed in the American market regarding advertising to end consumers in the field of health, and how it is possible to measure the effects of drug advertising and for this I strived for a solution.
I admit that from time to time I was also curious to see how it works in Israel, but it hasn't happened yet."
How difficult is it to be an entrepreneur in the health industry?
"There are many challenges, and there are almost no areas in which there is no competition, and competition is always a very challenging thing. Because we chose a very specific problem that previously was not visible on the surface, the competition against us at the beginning was very limited. You could count the players in it on the fingers of one hand.
I also decided to follow a very specific path during the establishment of the company when it comes to financing. Not to run for very large recruitments, to build the company with little money and in a networked way, and to build slowly based on the company's resources. To me, this seemed a very good direction because it allowed you to concentrate on the work itself Without the pressure of recruitment rounds.
The goal was to build a long-term company that would change the market, with a lot of faith that we would profit and everyone would benefit from it, if we did it. At a certain point when we started to move the market, very large companies joined, much larger than us, and we had to answer why We are because suddenly the competition came from big companies. But I am proud to say that we have maintained our market share and we are still the world's leader in this field."
Does the war affect your activities here?
"The Israeli development center currently employs 70 people and continues to grow. And I am happy to say that we are growing and flourishing despite the global economic situation that has been in the past year and now the war, we continue to recruit people despite the challenging times for the industry. The ability to deal with these crises makes us even stronger. In the long term, an industry Health will develop and last, and this is also something that greatly affects the economy and the resilience of Israel."
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