Today, Bristol Myers Squib (BMS) has fully acquired Karuna Therapeutics. We congratulate our customer on their fantastic success. Their product, KarXT, an antipsychotic, is revolutionary and is lined up for an FDA Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) in September 2024 for the treatment of schizophrenia in adults. KarXT also has potential for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and Bipolar disorder. It has the potential to be a blockbuster.
Karuna is using our DataOps Automation and TestGen products for commercial data analytics, along with some services. And it’s not the first DataKitchen customer to be bought by BMS. A few years ago, BMS purchased Celgene for $74 billion. Celgene made extensive use of DataKitchen products and services. And BMS is still a DataKitchen customer.
In the last three years, three of DataKitchen’s customers (Karuan, Celgene, and Acceleron) have been bought for $100 billion. What an incredible success!
We’d love to say that DataKitchen was the primary driver of that considerable acquisition value, but we are not. The lifesaving products and the people at those companies made them a success. But we played a small part in making them a big success.
James Royster said it best in a recent webinar:
“ All of us (on data teams) live on that knife’s edge, right? Where you work hard to deliver insight to your business customers. And they’re just relentlessly demanding. And it’s not because they don’t understand how hard you work. It’s because they have many other questions and things that they’re trying to answer correctly. They may be looking for insight, but they’re trying to balance all other business factors, competitive concerns, cash on hand, trying to convince other people, trying to make money, trying not to lose money. And in today’s world, speed matters.
But trust matters more. Hoping that the data and dashboards are correct is not a strategy. I sincerely want quality to be integrated into your process. For example, on Friday, when all of our data hit, whether it was our syndicated data, pharmacy data, or our campaign data, we ran upwards of 5000 q QC’s (quality checks) within the first seconds, ensuring that things were the way they were supposed to be and flag anything that was outside of the range of what we consider normal. Automated data quality pays enormous dividends.
Many people have made their careers fixing problems that probably shouldn’t have existed. I’m a bigger fan of not having problems exist, which means you need repeatable, standardized processes. DataOps lets you have a team that is ten times smaller than average in pharma and can get more done with fewer problems.”
At DataKitchen, we believe that the key to practical data analysis is a combination of speed, agility, automation, and quality, focusing on providing value to customers across all levels. Cultivating a value-based mindset, prioritizing long-term benefits, and maintaining a solid customer connection are crucial factors for driving excellence in data analytics. And it helps with a hefty valuation when our customers sell their companies!