Steve Herne, CEO at Unlearn – Interview Series

Steve Herne is a distinguished professional with over 25 years of experience in the pharmaceutical research and development industry. Throughout his career, he has held leadership roles at notable companies such as 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 as the Chief Executive Officer at Unlearn, where he continues to apply his deep industry knowledge and passion for healthcare innovation.

Unlearn develops cutting-edge AI technologies to tackle inefficiencies in medicine. Through its innovative digital twins—virtual patient models powered by the Unlearn Platform—the organization aims to streamline clinical development and drive precision medicine forward.

With a vision of transforming medicine into a computational science, Unlearn is focused on advancing healthcare outcomes and setting new standards for patient care.

You’ve recently taken over the role of CEO at Unlearn.AI after serving as Chief Commercial Officer. What has the transition been like for you?

It’s been an excellent transition, and I credit that to Unlearn’s people and culture. Looking ahead, my biggest priority is ensuring the company’s strategic goals, mission, and vision align. I’m currently focused on strengthening and building the executive team around me and will be adding new positions and team members in 2025 as we continue to grow and embrace a commercially driven business model.

Having a deep background in 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 remains unaltered—we will continue to improve clinical trials with AI and our technology. To continue pushing our team, I’m challenging them to step into our customers’ shoes as we work to address trial and error in medicine, specifically. At the end of the day, our goal is to ease our customers’ burdens and pain points, so as we strategize for the year ahead, I want them to understand the voice of our customers by considering the pressures and challenges they face. This is especially important as most of our staff have not had the opportunity to work directly on a clinical trial, given their career focus 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 used in this context?

In clinical trials, Unlearn’s AI models generate an individual digital twin for each patient before they are randomly assigned to the trial. Each digital twin forecasts one’s individual future health outcomes under placebo, regardless of the patient’s actual trial assignment. With our digital twin technology, researchers can run powerful trials with fewer participants at a reduced timeline compared to the traditional trial process.

We want to maximize the use of digital twins in clinical trials to power studies, reduce error, decrease the number of trial participants, and lower overall costs. However, we recognize that each circumstance and therapeutic area requires a slightly 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 coming years?

The future is bright, but it's still unknown. Pharmaceutical companies want to introduce innovation into their research processes to speed up decision-making and bring drugs to market faster. Since many of these companies’ next drug won’t enter the market until 2029 or 2030, they’re eager to speed up trial timelines with innovations like AI.

As these companies seek to innovate with artificial intelligence, we’re forging new partnerships while transforming the industry for the better. However, when looking at the adoption bell curve, this industry still falls under the “laggards” category, so taking a calculated risk—like integrating new technology into a process that has been unchanged for decades—is a leap that many pharmaceutical companies 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 next decade, and what milestones do you think need to be reached to fully realize this vision?

As mentioned, pharmaceutical companies tend to be more cautious of new innovations, preferring to adopt technology that is tried and tested. Despite that, some companies are already utilizing new innovations, but I believe the entire industry will more readily adopt AI and default to the technology in protocols over the next decade.

Since my last interview with Charles Fisher, how has the company’s focus shifted, and what new areas of AI application in clinical trials are you most excited about?

While our mission and vision remain unchanged, we’re adjusting our strategy slightly in 2025. We're folding our clients into our platform and products, ensuring full data integrity as we use confidential, patient-level data to train our disease-specific digital twin models that forecast each individual patient’s future health outcomes. It is through our customers’ eyes and ears that we can understand clinical trials’ challenges and what we can do to eliminate trial and error in medicine going forward.

What are some of the major milestones you hope Unlearn will achieve under your leadership, both in terms of 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 as the partner of choice to produce digital twins, and to write Unlearn into their clinical trial development plan before the trial even begins. Many companies understand the power of digital twins and are interested in creating them, and we’re able to help properly execute the technology.

As the company moves into this next phase of growth, how do you plan to foster a culture of innovation while maintaining the commercial 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 valuable product to clinical trials. Now we’re pivoting to what I call a product-first, commercially-executed stage of the company. We strive to continue growing the market’s adoption curve and building really strong products that customers not only need, but want to use to effectively address the challenges they face with their clinical trials.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Unlearn.

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