A Q&A with Nathan Ross, Director of Partnerships

Cornerstone AI is publishing a series of Q&As with team members to provide more information and context on their role at Cornerstone AI, as well as their professional background. This is the twelfth post of the series. Visit our blog to see previous posts in the series.

Your background is in healthcare and, later, business strategy/development—can you tell me a little about why you chose to go into those fields in the first place?

I've always been interested in healthcare, although I was unsure where I wanted to focus in the field. I studied neuroscience and healthcare economics at WashU, and really enjoyed working at the intersection of scientific research, business, and technology. 

Fortunately, I was able to have experiences in roles that worked with different stakeholders across the healthcare ecosystem—including large health systems, a central lab, and ultimately life sciences companies—which helped me find where in the space I could best contribute.

You worked with companies including ClearView Healthcare Partners and PicnicHealth before coming to Cornerstone AI—was there anything in particular that compelled you to make this change?

It was great to work at ClearView early in my career as we worked on projects with biopharma companies across the entire drug development process. 

One of the areas that really stood out to me was the potential that real-world data (RWD) had to answer questions that are hard to address with traditional clinical trials—and PicnicHealth was taking an innovative approach to this problem. They specialize in working directly with consenting patients to collect deep, longitudinal RWD, and this gave me exposure to the steps researchers need to take even once a dataset has been produced to turn this into insights for providers, patients, payers, etc.

This gap is where Cornerstone helps biopharma sponsors and data providers accelerate the time to reach analysis-ready data, maximize data quality, and save cost. I think our CEO, Viraj, has called this a “data plumbing” problem in a recent podcast, and that really resonated with me when I first heard about Cornerstone.

On a day-to-day basis, what does your work look like? What drives you to continue the work each day?

I help lead business development and our go-to-market efforts broadly—including engaging with prospective customers, designing partnerships, and refining our GTM strategy/marketing collateral/etc. 

Being on a small, but mighty, team is exciting as our to-do list can vary day-to-day—some days are focused on speaking with companies who haven’t worked with Cornerstone yet, while others may be focused on meeting new teams at our existing customers to see if Cornerstone can help with new use cases.

What helps drive me each day is that I've seen the time it can take to actually turn data into insights, and Cornerstone addresses this problem head on to help get more high-quality research done, faster.  

What does the future hold for Cornerstone AI? 

I really believe that we've entered, and will continue to be in, a new stage of data availability in the life sciences—and there will be a compounding need for solutions that help companies accelerate turning data into trustworthy research. Cornerstone’s AI-powered approach helps facilitate this process while saving time, cost, and maximizing research quality—all with full transparency and auditability.

In the next 5-10 years, I could see Cornerstone working more in helping companies effectively harmonize and produce insights from the combination of real-world + clinical data. As sponsors start to combine more data from EHR sources, patient-generated data, biomarkers, etc. into the traditional research process (e.g., for improving patient identification and screening for clinical trials), Cornerstone can help make these data consistent and usable faster.

What are you most proud of in your professional and/or personal life?

One that comes to mind is during my time at PicnicHealth, we set up a decentralized registry for patients with a rare metabolic condition to better study the natural history of disease and unmet needs. Over time, the sponsor we worked with was able to produce such impactful research that they wanted to partner together on how PicnicHealth’s technology could be adapted to collect long-term follow-up (LTFU) data for patients that participated in their pivotal trials. I’m really proud of the work we did with that team on how the model could be evolved to meet the use case, how to effectively educate and work with sites, patients, and caregivers on how this would work, etc., and it’s been great to watch from the sidelines how this model for LTFU is now being used by multiple sponsors. 

Outside of work, I am a proud dog dad to two Springerdoodles (definitely worth googling if you haven’t heard the term before) and raising our one pup, Spud, since he was about 8 weeks old is something I look back on fondly. Even though puppy life had plenty of ups and downs, navigating that was very fulfilling for me personally.

What are you passionate about outside of work?

I’m a lifelong sailor; I grew up racing boats on the East coast and now have a 1980s racer/cruiser sailboat that we take out a lot in Seattle. I love sharing the experience of sailing with friends and family—and it’s a great way to get outside when it’s not raining. 

I’m also passionate about cooking—we try to cook at home as much as we can. It’s a great way to spend quality time together each week and it’s fun to explore new recipes and combinations of ingredients/dishes that can work together.