7 hours Ago By Isabelle Kirkwood
It’s a common situation that’s often invisible to patients: a pharmaceutical rep stands with a doctor in the hallway between exam rooms, explaining a new drug or medical device. The sales rep often has just minutes to accurately distill pages of information, including clinical data, dosing guidelines, regulatory requirements, and patient eligibility. And according to Parth Khanna, co-founder and CEO of Toronto-based , there is a lot riding on reps doing this job well.
“If you’re a cloud platform and you want to scale a software solution to the world, then AWS is the right partner.” “Imagine you’re a patient with a rare disease, and a new treatment for it has just been approved by the FDA, but your physician doesn’t know it exists,” Khanna said. ACTO describes its platform as a painkiller for this problem.
The scaleup has developed a software platform that equips pharmaceutical reps with the tools they need when they are out in the field to speak competently and confidently to doctors about new treatments, when it matters most. The platform combines access to approved content, coaching support, AI assistants, and training tools for field reps, as well as real-time data and advanced analytics that track rep interactions and generate commercial insights for company leaders about what’s working and where reps can improve. “We set out to build an intelligent field excellence platform that has brought almost a dozen different solutions and capabilities into one application,” Khanna explained.
And as ACTO expands internationally to meet the global demand of the life sciences industry, the platform must also address strict rules on data security and patient privacy, which can vary in each regulatory market. ACTO is focused on transforming how vital drug information reaches healthcare providers, but it wasn’t always that way. Founded in 2014, ACTO started as a platform to help professionals across various industries apply knowledge in their daily work.
By 2016, it was clear where the platform could make the most impact: life sciences. Khanna said pharma companies spend billions of dollars and take up to 14 years of research and development to bring a single life-saving treatment to market. This effort has largely directed investment and technology toward the early stages of the drug development lifecycle to try and get these new treatments to patients waiting in need.
“Imagine what happens when you have this massive pipeline, and one of those products actually gets approved,” he added. “How do these products get communicated to the market? How does the healthcare provider know about the new treatment option? If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears about it, did it actually fall?” Today, ACTO’s platform is available to reps in more than 90 countries, but with each new region comes a new set of regulatory challenges, according to co-founder and CTO Kumar Erramilli. In Europe, for example, data laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) strictly require that client data remains within the country of origin.
Staying compliant with regulations like the GDPR meant that simply adding more servers was not an option. ACTO needed to focus on building a secure, flexible infrastructure that could quickly adjust to local compliance standards. So, the scaleup started building with cloud provider AWS.
“AWS is the pinnacle of enterprise SaaS architecture,” Erramilli said. “If you’re a cloud platform and you want to scale a software solution to the world, then AWS is the right partner.” Erramilli said AWS’s relational database service and its Aurora database allow ACTO to keep data local while automating essential tasks.
“How we do our backups, how we do failover scenarios, how we do disaster recovery—AWS has global enterprise standards around that, and they’ve done this thousands of times around,” he added. AWS’s infrastructure also includes compliance with certifications like SOC 2 Type II, which ensures all platform data is handled with strict safeguards. “When auditors are auditing your security infrastructure, they hear that everything is on AWS and almost have immediate peace of mind,” Erramilli added.
As ACTO’s platform has expanded, the team noticed a new challenge: field reps need quick, compliant answers on the go. This realization led to the creation of , ACTO’s conversational generative AI knowledge assistant launched in October. LAICA gives field reps clear, medical, legal and regulatory-approved answers to questions about disease states, product details, clinical evidence, market access, and competition—all in real time.
Erramilli explained that ACTO uses Amazon Bedrock to securely use Anthropic’s AI models without data ever leaving AWS’s infrastructure. Using these models, LAICA can instantly support reps with precise answers within a ‘walled garden,’ or a closed ecosystem. “For pharmaceutical companies, ensuring that the content from which answers are generated for reps are the most recent and company-approved versions was critical.
The closed ecosystem gives them this control. It also means if a security breach happens on a third-party server, like a GPT server, we’re not affected because our data is entirely within our secure environment,” Erramilli said. Khanna said ACTO’s focus remains on becoming the top choice for specialty pharma companies aiming to improve interactions between reps and healthcare providers.
With LAICA now launched, the scaleup is steadily expanding its AI-enabled offerings, and aims to create an ecosystem that integrates content, models, and data. While heavily regulated industries like life sciences can be slow and cautious about new tech, Khanna said ACTO wants to make AI feel less daunting. “Yes, it’s a new horizon, but by working with partners that understand your industry really well, it doesn’t have to be that scary,” he added.
He sees AWS as a practical foundation that allows ACTO to focus on secure and compliant solutions that help reps maximize the positive impact of new treatments. “AWS gives us a very strong base to build from,” Khanna said. AWS Startups is dedicated to supporting Canadian Innovators.
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