Amy Abernethy was named president of clinical research business at Verily, an Alphabet company.
Alphabet is the parent company of Google and several former Google subsidiaries. Verily’s clinical research started with the Baseline program, a suite of studies using patient-centric tools for research data collection.
The company’s June 3 announcement foreshadows Verily’s planned expansion into a full-scale clinical evidence generation platform supporting a broad range of clinical trials and real-world evidence studies. As president of this business unit, Abernethy will oversee this overall product vision and Verily’s related clinical research portfolio.
“I have always been focused on a singular goal—taking better care of the patient sitting in front of me, smarter and faster,” Abernethy said to The Cancer Letter. “As an oncologist, solving this problem for the cancer patient was a particular goal.
“When I was at FDA, and as the pandemic raged on, it was clear to me that we must innovate and improve the productivity of our clinical evidence generation infrastructure,” Abernethy said. “New clinical trial designs, better use of data, patient-centric solutions that allow anyone to participate. Verily has already started solving this and I am excited to join and help drive the vision forward.”
Abernethy was most recently principal deputy commissioner of Food and Drugs at the FDA and the agency’s acting chief information officer. (The Cancer Letter, Jan. 4, 2019)
In over two years with FDA, Abernethy is credited with having catalyzed enduring changes in the way the FDA uses data as well as advancing FDA’s work in RWE and personalized medicine.
She also spearheaded FDA’s shift toward cloud-based data interoperability, thereby streamlining the agency’s interaction with the health data ecosystem as outlined in the agency’s technology and data modernization action plans.
“There is no one better positioned to catapult Verily’s clinical research business into its next important phase than Amy, with her understanding of clinical practice, research, data science and the evolving regulatory environment,” Andy Conrad, CEO and founder of Verily, said in a statement. “Amy has been at the forefront of the use of clinical data to accelerate clinical trials and enable the uptake of real-world evidence. Her focus on improving the efficiency of the development and availability of new medicines aligns with our goals to transform clinical research by making it easier and faster to run clinical studies.”
Before FDA, Abernethy was chief medical officer, chief scientific officer and senior vice president of oncology at Flatiron Health, a healthcare technology and services company focused on accelerating cancer research and improving patient care that is now part of the Roche Group (The Cancer Letter, March 31, 2017)
Abernethy is a hematologist/oncologist and palliative medicine physician.
Before joining Flatiron, she was professor of medicine at Duke University School of Medicine and directed the Center for Learning Health Care in the Duke Clinical Research Institute and Duke Cancer Care Research Program in the Duke Cancer Institute.
