Regeneron and Novartis on Innovating to Accommodate Growing Pipelines

Rinol Alaj is Senior Director, Head of Clinical Outcomes Assessment (COA) and Patient Innovation at Regeneron. His professional focus is centered around integrated innovation, design thinking, and clinical operation with 15+ years of experience in the startup and pharma industries. A savvy, results-oriented leader, Mr Alaj has proven success in transforming and building eCOA organizations from the ground up. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science from New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he also went on to earn his MBA. Mr Alaj is currently pursuing his Master’s in Public Health – Epidemiology and Biostats program at CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy.

Bill Illis is the Global Head of Collaboration and Technology Strategy, in the Global Drug Development, Analytics line function at Novartis and is currently responsible for developing the Analytics Technology strategy, initiating, and overseeing a portfolio of analytics capability development and improvement projects.Mr Illis has over 25 years of industry experience in R&D spanning subject areas of Cancer Epidemiology, Health Care Cost/Utilization Research; Preclinical Safety, and Clinical Development and Regulatory Affairs, and functional leadership in Data Mgmt, Programming, Statistics, Data Standards, Data Governance, Information Technology and Operations.Mr Illis has led business and information technology functions at Novartis, and has developed and led transformation projects in data and digital across the pharma R&D landscape. Mr Illis was appointed as workstream lead for the TransCelerate Digital Data Flow initiative in June 2018. Mr Illis holds a Master’s Degree in Public Health (Biostatistics) from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Providence College.

Bari Kowal joined Regeneron in 2015 and became Head of Global Clinical Operations in 2017. Ms Kowal currently serves as Senior Vice President, Development Operations and Portfolio Management and is responsible for clinical trial strategy and execution, along with overseeing our development shared services functions. Prior to Regeneron, Ms Kowal was previously at Pfizer where she held the positions of Vice President, Business Operations and Analytics, and, prior to that, Vice President, Strategic Alliance and Development Operations Lead. Ms. Kowal also served as Vice President, Clinical Operations, on the clinical research organization side of the industry at a number of biotech organizations in a variety of clinical research roles early in her career. She holds a BS in Biology from the State University of New York at Binghamton and an MS in Neuroscience from New York University.

Henry Wei, MD, is Executive Director, Development Innovation at Regeneron, aimed at accelerating clinical research. Dr Wei previously worked at Google, the White House, Aetna, and McKinsey. Dr Wei has co-authored several patents on applied artificial intelligence in healthcare and on real-world data, outcomes and drug safety. He earned his MD at Cornell, his graduate and undergraduate degrees at Harvard University, and did additional informatics training at Stanford and Harvard.Dr Wei is an adjunct faculty member at Weill-Cornell Medicine in Health Policy and Research. He currently leads TransCelerate’s pragmatic trials workstream within the Real-World Data initiative.