Health IT, Pharma, Startups

Entrepreneur recuperating from heart surgery wins hackathon pitch for Teva project

Entrepreneurs face plenty of stress pitching a new idea to a potential customer. But most […]

Entrepreneurs face plenty of stress pitching a new idea to a potential customer. But most don’t have to do it the day they’re discharged from the hospital after having laparoscopic heart surgery. But that’s exactly what John Quillen did when he used Gotomeeting from his home to walk big pharma company Teva (NYSE: TEVA) and the judges assembled at the event through a one hour long presentation for his submission for the Philly Enterprise Hackathon’s life science track competition.

His proposal to set up his software-as-a-service marketing platform for the big pharma company to launch drugs into multiple markets won the $50,000 prize along with $1,000 worth of Amazon web service credit.

On the bright side, the days ahead as he works with Teva and launches his new company with the $50,000 he won to help develop the platform are not likely to get any more stressful.

“After that, I slept for two days,” he told MedCity News in a phone interview.

Quillen is a veteran of GlaxoSmithKline where he worked for 12 years in bioinformatics on the research and development side until he was laid off. He later started a life sciences consulting company, Euclidean Group.

“When I was at GSK I developed customized software internally, but as the market matured, we started using more and more off-the-shelf solutions, comparing business requirements with systems on the market,” said Quillen. “I was excited by the hackathon because ideally [Teva] wants this as a software as-a-service — they want something custom built for their needs that fills a gap in the market, but they want to make it available to others in the market to reduce its cost.”

The platform needs to do two things: provide transparency so management can observe how the countries are moving along on their plans to execute but also have a standard process to operate efficiently in each country.

“I think it’s a really good way to bring business problems to light. And from a pharmaceutical company’s perspective, it means a relatively big return on a small investment if it works out,” Quillen added.

The Greater Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies or PACT is one of the groups behind the competition alongside businesses such as law firm Morgan Lewis, investors Safeguard Scientifics (NYSE: SFE) and First Round Capital, and software developer NextDocs. Teva sponsored the life science track of the Philly Enterprise Hackathon.

The idea is that producing solutions for such a complex challenge will lead to new technology companies and stimulate job growth in the region.

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