Steve Herne is a distinguished skilled with over 25 years of experience within the pharmaceutical research and development industry. Throughout his profession, he has held leadership roles at notable firms reminiscent of WCG, Bioclinica, ERT, Icon Development Solutions, Covance, MDS Pharma Services, and Inveresk Research. In these positions, Herne excelled in driving long-term growth, providing strategic direction, and expanding product portfolios.
His expertise encompasses business development, strategic planning, product management, and marketing, all contributing to significant market share growth. Herne now serves because the Chief Executive Officer at Unlearn, where he continues to use his deep industry knowledge and fervour for healthcare innovation.
Unlearn develops cutting-edge AI technologies to tackle inefficiencies in medicine. Through its revolutionary digital twins—virtual patient models powered by the Unlearn Platform—the organization goals to streamline clinical development and drive precision medicine forward.
With a vision of remodeling medicine right into a computational science, Unlearn is concentrated on advancing healthcare outcomes and setting recent standards for patient care.
You’ve recently taken over the role of CEO at Unlearn.AI after serving as Chief Business Officer. What has the transition been like for you?
It’s been a wonderful transition, and I credit that to Unlearn’s people and culture. Looking ahead, my biggest priority is ensuring the corporate’s strategic goals, mission, and vision align. I’m currently focused on strengthening and constructing the chief team around me and will likely be adding recent positions and team members in 2025 as we proceed to grow and embrace a commercially driven business model.
Having a deep background within the pharmaceutical industry, what perspectives or strategies are you bringing to Unlearn that differ from the more technical and research-driven approach led by Charles Fisher?
Unlearn’s mission and vision stays unaltered—we’ll proceed to enhance clinical trials with AI and our technology. To proceed pushing our team, I’m difficult them to step into our customers’ shoes as we work to handle trial and error in medicine, specifically. At the tip of the day, our goal is to ease our customers’ burdens and pain points, in order we strategize for the 12 months ahead, I need them to know the voice of our customers by considering the pressures and challenges they face. This is very necessary as most of our staff haven’t had the chance to work directly on a clinical trial, given their profession concentrate on AI or machine learning.
Unlearn has been a pioneer in integrating digital twins into clinical trials. Could you briefly explain to our readers how digital twin technology is utilized in this context?
In clinical trials, Unlearn’s AI models generate a person digital twin for every patient before they’re randomly assigned to the trial. Each digital twin forecasts one’s individual future health outcomes under placebo, whatever the patient’s actual trial task. With our digital twin technology, researchers can run powerful trials with fewer participants at a reduced timeline in comparison with the normal trial process.
We would like to maximise the usage of digital twins in clinical trials to power studies, reduce error, decrease the variety of trial participants, and lower overall costs. Nevertheless, we recognize that every circumstance and therapeutic area requires a rather different approach, which is why we develop disease-specific models trained on patient-level data to predict how a participant’s health will change over time.
In your opinion, how will AI-driven digital twin technology transform the landscape of clinical research in the approaching years?
The long run is shiny, nevertheless it’s still unknown. Pharmaceutical firms wish to introduce innovation into their research processes to hurry up decision-making and convey drugs to market faster. Since a lot of these firms’ next drug won’t enter the market until 2029 or 2030, they’re desperate to speed up trial timelines with innovations like AI.
As these firms seek to innovate with artificial intelligence, we’re forging recent partnerships while transforming the industry for the higher. Nevertheless, when taking a look at the adoption bell curve, this industry still falls under the “laggards” category, so taking a calculated risk—like integrating recent technology right into a process that has been unchanged for a long time—is a leap that many pharmaceutical firms are still hesitant to make.
Unlearn’s mission is to eliminate trial and error in medicine. How do you see the role of AI evolving in healthcare over the subsequent decade, and what milestones do you think that have to be reached to completely realize this vision?
As mentioned, pharmaceutical firms are likely to be more cautious of latest innovations, preferring to adopt technology that’s tried and tested. Despite that, some firms are already utilizing recent innovations, but I consider the whole industry will more readily adopt AI and default to the technology in protocols over the subsequent decade.
Since my last interview with Charles Fisher, how has the corporate’s focus shifted, and what recent areas of AI application in clinical trials are you most enthusiastic about?
While our mission and vision remain unchanged, we’re adjusting our strategy barely in 2025. We’re folding our clients into our platform and products, ensuring full data integrity as we use confidential, patient-level data to coach our disease-specific digital twin models that forecast each individual patient’s future health outcomes. It is thru our customers’ eyes and ears that we are able to understand clinical trials’ challenges and what we are able to do to eliminate trial and error in medicine going forward.
What are a few of the main milestones you hope Unlearn will achieve under your leadership, each when it comes to technology and market impact?
On a macro level, I hope to see digital twin technology enhance every clinical trial. On a micro level, it’s my goal for clinicians to view Unlearn because the partner of alternative to supply digital twins, and to jot down Unlearn into their clinical trial development plan before the trial even begins. Many firms understand the facility of digital twins and are concerned with creating them, and we’re in a position to help properly execute the technology.
As the corporate moves into this next phase of growth, how do you intend to foster a culture of innovation while maintaining the industrial viability of the AI solutions you’re bringing to market?
Since our founding seven and a half years ago, we’ve been focused on research and development to bring our helpful product to clinical trials. Now we’re pivoting to what I call a product-first, commercially-executed stage of the corporate. We attempt to proceed growing the market’s adoption curve and constructing really strong products that customers not only need, but wish to use to effectively address the challenges they face with their clinical trials.
