Arcutis was founded in 2016 to address significant unmet needs in medical dermatology. The company is a commercial stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercialising medical dermatology products.
Its management team has extensive expertise in the development and commercialization of pharmaceutical products, having held key leadership roles at a number of leading dermatology companies and successfully developed more than 50 FDA-approved products.
Rajvir Madan is Arcutis’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer and a strong advocate of cultural and technological transformation at the company, heightening its cybersecurity and technology achievements.
A culture of collaboration
Culture is pivotal to Arcutis Biotherapeutics, down to its inception. Previously working at L’Oreal, Rajvir moved into the pharmaceutical and healthcare space over a decade ago, when his mother was diagnosed with cancer.
“ It was inspired by this personal mission that I could do more in terms of committing my energy and skills to helping advance the cause of patients, the cause of the healthcare industry in general,” he explains.
“And since then I've been in the pharmaceutical industry, working for two large pharma companies and today for Arcutis Biotherapeutics.”
Today Rajvir’s passion for cultural transformation and its impact on technology is highly evident.
“ It goes back to the quote from Peter Drucker that says, ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. In my opinion, it eats it for lunch and dinner as well,” he says.
“Without the right culture, I don't think we can be successful as a technology team, and I don't think we can be successful as an organisation in general. So we spend a lot of time thinking about culture.”
The culture at Arcutis is not one of vague, subjective corporate values but of thirteen decisive operating principles that are the DNA of the company, informing how it functions.
“Our first and perhaps most important operating principle is that the patient is paramount,” he explains.
“So everything that we do is really embedded in the patient and making sure that we look at things from the lens of the patient.
Another is about accountability and empowerment. We really want to push decision making down to the lowest level of the organisation and then ultimately hold our team members accountable for the delivery of those results.”
This culture of holistic and democratic decision making is underpinned by an awareness of the benefits of not only having a team of specialist staff, but also harnessing their knowledge and expertise to make better decisions.
“I do not want to be the smartest person or the most intelligent person in the IT department,” Rajvir says.
“I actually believe that the individuals that I hire need to be a lot smarter than I am. And they need to have this expertise in selecting the right technologies once we've defined what the appropriate problem statements are for the organisation.”
Key to this culture is fostering a growth mindset, where experimentation and failure is met with support and improvement. This is critical in healthcare and pharma, where only a small minority of potential drugs reach commercialisation.
“We encourage that notion of innovation and that notion of risk taking because that's part and parcel of the business that we're running,” Rajvir explains.
Arcutis is both patient-centric and user centric. Every employee is a shareholder holding stock in the company, encouraging this perspective when it comes to broader organisational change and resource use.
Arcutis is also highly data-driven, an approach evident in how they identify and implement key technology projects.
The company begins by defining the key value metrics of the project, which could include revenue improvement, cost savings, or productivity enhancements. They then work to ensure they are unlocking the most value from the technology.
Rajvir praises his executive team of peers, who he works with to align IT efforts with business strategy. He feels it’s imperative to create, maintain and pay attention to this cross-functional alignment to ensure business continuity.
Nowhere is this need to ensure business continuity more evident than in Arcutis’s cybersecurity, where the organisation defines a clear roadmap, fosters education and drives the adoption of specific tools, resources and processes.
Revamping Cybersecurity
One of Arcutis’s biggest technological developments has been with its cybersecurity.
Rajvir argues that cybersecurity in the healthcare space has both dramatically evolved and remained pretty consistent. What hasn’t changed is the biggest attack vector - account takeover. What has changed are the technologies within this space that threat actors leverage, a fact which has required Arcutis to continually evolve.
“When I joined the organisation, it was quite evident to me that our cybersecurity programme was not where it needed to be,” says Rajvir.
“We had just become a public company. And in about a few months after my joining the organisation, we were also going to potentially become a commercial company. “
Arcutis was waiting for its first drug to get approved by the FDA, an achievement which fuelled a data-driven evaluation of its cybersecurity maturity.
“We asked ourselves where we want to be in terms of that maturity level in the next 12 months, 24 months and then 36 months,” he says.
“Based on those stakes in the ground we created a roadmap and a vision around how we would get to that aspirational state.”
Arcutis’s operational principle of empowerment and accountability has factored strongly into its cybersecurity approach, which hinges on education.
“We wanted to empower every individual within the organisation to be that human shield for us,” Rajvir explains.
“We took a very user-centric approach, making sure that the tools, the people, the processes that we were selecting were going to work for our industry and our organisation.”
Arcutis’s cyber security program drives education on both the executive and wider organisational level. This education takes the form of tabletop exercises, consistent testing and training and continual preparation of incident response plans.
Another focus for the company is technology. Arcutis has invested in its technology stack and explored areas of possible optimisation, striving to expand this across the organisation.
Keeping pace with technological change
Rajvir describes the biggest challenge of his role as staying abreast of technological change.
“We want to make sure every technology decision is ultimately going to solve a real problem that one of our users, one of our stakeholders is experiencing, whether that's an internal stakeholder or for an external stakeholder,” he says.
“Staying abreast of technological changes and understanding which developments are the most meaningful for our organisation is a big thing I have to wrestle with. The landscape is constantly changing, last year it was Gen AI, this year it's Agentic AI.”
When adopting technology, Arcutis again seeks to ensure cohesion between IT investments and business goals. The team constantly measures and evaluates return on investment, going back to previous adoptions to ensure optimal current use.
In speaking about industry challenges in general, Rajvir thinks that one of the critical challenges- in addition to cybersecurity- is the challenge of drug discovery and development. Nine out of ten drugs developed never make it to the commercialisation stage, failing the clinical trial process. Drugs that make it can take anywhere between 10 to 12 years to get to commercial state product. Naturally, this is a costly, risky and time-consuming process.
“Even with these challenges, Arcutis has three FDA approved products and a robust pipeline with multiple clinical programs for a range of inflammatory dermatological conditions. The incorporation of AI into our processes will only further accelerate our progress,” says Rajvir.
Rajvir highlights AI in this light as a true gamechanger for the drug discovery and development processes.
“ First of all, it will help when predicting efficacy and the safety profiles of specific drugs,” he explains.
“But I think it's also going to help to identify patients likely to succeed on a specific drug. By doing that, they can bring the right patients into clinical trials so that they maximise the benefit for the patients and ultimately for the pharma company as well.”
Another challenge involved after this is the process of filing for regulatory approvals, with Rajvir explaining it typically takes companies anywhere from six to nine months to put a regulatory submission together in the US for the FDA. This process involves extensive data, content development and process management- which all could be streamlined through AI.
“The faster you file a regulatory submission, the faster you get FDA approval, which means the faster you can get your product into a commercial stage,” he adds “ This ultimately has significant benefits for patients as well as for the pharma company.”
A key step in ensuring best technology practices is selecting the correct vendors, which Arcutis approaches methodically.
“When we select technology vendors, I think the first thing that we look for is are they going to be a fit for our business needs and our objectives?” says Rajvir. “ We evaluate them on their competency, expertise, reputation and on their track record.”
A partner that stood out during this evaluation was Yash Technologies, which supports Arcutis on its cybersecurity journey.
“ We’ve hired them to run a fairly significant chunk of our cybersecurity operations,” Rajvir explains.
“They’re constantly willing to be agile and flexible, moving with us as our requirements and needs change.
They’re also willing to come to the table and say look, you guys are doing great in all these areas, but here’s where we think you could evolve your capabilities. It's been useful to our business to have that dialogue.”
Rajvir is very much a proponent of the saying that it “takes a village”. Yash is one of many other partnerships that help showcase the art of the possible for Arcutis, strengthening the collaboration that informs its approach to the biopharmaceutical industry.
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