Angela HolmesFormer EY consultant Angela Holmes is an AI strategist focused on the intersection of life sciences and technology in clinical development, precision medicine and digital health. As CEO of OmniScience, Angela is working to improve human health through her team’s unparalleled expertise in biology and data science.
At OmniScience, we build AI and machine learning solutions. As computational life scientists — biomedical engineers, neuroscientists, computational biologists, biophysicists, pharmacologists, engineers, computer scientists — we work for pharma, biotech and digital health companies to support clinical research and clinical trials to advance novel therapeutics to get treatments to patients who need them.
With the rise of generative AI, the pace of innovation in AI and life sciences is accelerating. We’re very excited about a lot of new treatments that are coming out of AI-enabled drug discovery, and our challenge — the world’s challenge — is that for all of those drugs to get to patients, they’ve got to get through clinical trials. Clinical trials have not changed in decades. Eighty percent of them come in late and over budget. They have high failure rates. We are on a mission to use AI to improve human health – but in particular, to transform how clinical trials are run, to better enable science from the data that’s captured, and lower costs and increase speed. That’s our work.Life sciences and drug innovation require high-consequence decision-making. Clinical trials mean you are giving experimental treatments to real people. Patient safety is paramount. There’s also a tremendous amount of capital at stake in this industry — hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. There are regulatory considerations to navigate. But we’re still making a lot of decisions based on intuition because we are overwhelmed by the volume in data. Large language model (LLM) technology gives us the potential to become knowledge enabled so we can get true insights at scale, when we need them, to improve our decision-making in all forms.
When I came to EY as a biomedical engineer who wanted to work on digital transformation in life sciences and health, I was impressed with the focus on teaming. In today’s global, complex, heterogenous world, you have to leverage every person’s talents and gifts and way of working. I worked with great people on top-tier teams who thought and collaborated inclusively — and always in service of the organization’s mission. Nobody was building shiny tools for the sake of shiny tools. We used the collective talent across EY, which is significant, to really transform an organization, drive its mission forward and create value.
Of course, I can’t forget the hours, the pressure and the travel. But even that can be memorable. Traveling and working with senior leaders very early in my career, being in the room with our clients’ leadership teams — mostly being quiet but listening and absorbing and being shaped by all those strategies — that experience has stayed with me my entire career.I have to be honest. I was not focused on my network early on. I was very focused on my individual contributions. But I also didn’t understand that a network is not all about who you know; it’s also about what you can do and what you know that can help others. It took me a little bit longer in my career to understand the value of leveraging that network and those relationships, but it has had an immeasurable impact.