COTA was founded in 2011 by doctors, engineers, and data scientists to create clarity from fragmented and often inaccessible real-world data. Pulse 2.0 interviewed COTA Chief Financial Officer Ritu Uppal Bahal to learn more about the company.
Ritu Uppal Bahal’s Background
What is Ritu Uppal Bahal’s background? Bahal said:
“I’ve spent most of my career in finance and operations roles across the healthcare, marketing, communications, and retail industries. Originally from London, I began my career in the audit division and transaction advisory practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers after university. Following that, I spent nearly 20 years at Kantar and its parent company, WPP, including serving as Chief Financial Officer for Kantar Health and Kantar Insights in the Americas.”
“After decades with large corporations, I joined COTA in 2021 as Chief Financial Officer to seek new challenges in a fast-paced, growth-oriented environment. As CFO, I’ve worked closely with the other members of the leadership team to support a major funding round, optimize our financial strategies for COTA’s expansion, and build crucial relationships with customers, partners, and financial advisors. At COTA, I focus on aligning our financial objectives with our mission to revolutionize healthcare through technology by implementing robust financial systems, ensuring efficient capital allocation, and providing financial insights for data-driven decision-making across the organization. My role extends beyond traditional finance functions to shaping our strategic direction and ensuring we have the financial resources and efficiency to achieve our ambitious goals in the healthcare technology sector.”
Formation Of COTA Healthcare
How did the idea for the company come together? Bahal shared: ”In oncology, Real World Data, from sources like electronic health records and doctors notes, is a powerful tool that helps researchers, clinicians, life sciences companies, and others understand how patients are treated in current clinical practice. Compared to clinical trial data, which shows patients’ outcomes with medications in a highly controlled environment at a specific moment in time, RWD encompasses a wide range of data types – electronic health records, insurance claims, genomics data, and others – that reveal how patients with cancer are treated in the real world. RWD also often includes a more diverse range of healthcare populations than clinical trials, making the data sources more representative of wide demographic groups.”
“COTA was founded by oncologists who wanted to help other physicians bring clarity to cancer with RWD. The initial goal was to aggregate high-quality RWD, clean and organize it, and analyze it to reveal trends in cancer treatment that could inform care for the patient in front of them. For example, if the data showed that a group of patients with the same cancer type as their patient lived six months longer with one treatment than another, they could use that information to assess whether that medicine would work well for their patient.”
“Since then, we’ve enhanced our data curation abilities with AI and increased our reach to include life sciences companies. Today, our high-quality RWD tells the stories of millions of patients’ cancer journeys to help life sciences companies develop better, more personalized cancer treatments.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Bahal’s favorite memory working for the company so far? Bahal reflected:
“One of my favorite memories at COTA has been CAMP COTA, our annual two-day retreat that brings together our hybrid team to focus on team building, strategy, and innovation. Launched in 2022 after the pandemic, CAMP COTA underscores what makes our culture special–a relentless drive for innovation and deep commitment to helping those affected by cancer find a clear path to care. Each year, we make a point to highlight the stories of cancer survivors to remind us of the people behind our data, which is always incredibly moving and reinforces the importance of our mission.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Bahal explained:
“COTA’s real-world dataset is curated by a team of medical oncologists to ensure its accuracy and completeness, and it provides a representative picture of cancer care across the U.S. Our AI-powered data curation engine, CAILIN, amplifies the power of the data and expands possibilities for cancer research. CAILIN automates some of our data abstraction and curation to help our medical oncologists prepare datasets for research much more efficiently. It also creates a new interface through which researchers can ask questions of our data as they would in a search engine, then receive an answer in minutes.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Bahal and the team faced in building the company? Bahal acknowledged:
“Like many companies in our sector, we’ve had to manage expenses while pursuing sustainable and efficient growth, as our business scales and matures. Unlike others in our space experiencing heavy cash burn, we’ve stayed lean and focused on a strategy that puts us on a clear path to profitability. By reprioritizing our customer focus and rethinking our data delivery and partnership approach, we’ve diversified our pipeline and improved engagement. Our strategic investment in AI has introduced new costs, but we’ve offset these with the efficiencies gained from automation. Each challenge has been an opportunity for our team to refine our strategies and strengthen our business and cash flow.”
Evolution Of COTA’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Bahal noted:
“In the early days of our technology, we were using AI in some ways to help our medical oncologists extract data from electronic health records. As data extraction is a largely manual and expensive process, we imagined the AI could provide some lift to our experts. Today, we’re using AI in a much bigger way with CAILIN. While it will never replace our medical oncologists, CAILIN has taken on the lion’s share of data extraction and curation to streamline their work and allow much more data to be added to our dataset, at a faster rate than we could have imagined before.”
“In addition, CAILIN expands possibilities for more researchers to perform analyses in our dataset. Previously, RWD analyses were restricted to people with coding expertise – effectively excluding the oncologists or clinical development leads who know cancer well but not the ins and outs of data science. CAILIN offers a large language model through which researchers can type their query into a search engine-type interface and receive a reliable answer. Bringing more high-quality data to more cancer experts means more opportunities to unlock the next lifesaving finding in cancer care.”
“We’re already seeing this technology have an impact in the clinic. Through our partnership with Texas Oncology’s Precision Health Informatics, LLC (PHI), clinicians across their community oncology network can use CAILIN to generate meaningful insights at the point of care. For patients, this means being able to benefit from highly personalized, data-informed, and precise treatment for their cancer.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Bahal cited:
“In 2022, we secured a strategic financing round from Deerfield Management and existing investors, enabling us to accelerate the expansion of COTA’s RWD platform and services into new markets. Since then, our business has continued to gain significant market traction. In April, we launched a strategic collaboration with Sanofi to accelerate their oncology clinical trials with RWD and AI. A month later, we announced a partnership with PreciseDX and Baptist Health South Florida to validate the performance of an AI-enabled diagnostic test – called PreciseBreast – that predicts the likelihood of invasive breast cancer recurrence. Most recently, we announced a partnership with Texas Oncology’s Precision Health Informatics.”
“In addition to strong pipeline growth and financial and operational performance, we expanded our product suite and opportunity to engage with pharma industry leaders on Generative AI. The new offering: ‘Vista’ is a large pan-cancer dataset that is curated exclusively using technology and AI, eliminating the need for human data abstraction. We introduced two discrete products for life science companies, Real-World Insights and Real-World Support, and released ‘COTA Connect,’ a data linking capability that securely and compliantly integrates our deep, clinical, de-identified EHR data with other data types, such as genomic data. These milestones have been significant steps forward in our mission to make cancer care more accurate and targeted, improving outcomes for patients with cancer.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Bahal about customer success stories, Bahal highlighted:
“We have a diverse range of customers and partners who are all working with us to improve cancer outcomes in their unique fields. From life sciences partners like Sanofi who use our RWD and AI to inform their study design with a deeper understanding of the treatment landscape in multiple myeloma, to Baptist Health and PreciseDX’s evaluation of tools that can expand access to innovations in cancer care to Texas Oncology’s use of CAILIN with community oncology providers to improve patient care, our partners cover a broad spectrum of opportunities to transform the ways we treat cancer.”
Funding
When asking Bahal about the company’s funding details, she revealed:
“We announced our latest financing from healthcare investment firm Deerfield Management and existing investors in 2022, which has helped fuel the expansion of COTA’s RWD platform and services as we scale to new markets.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Bahal assessed:
“The global oncology market is projected to reach $521.6 billion by 2033, driven by the acceleration of AI innovation and the integration of advanced analytics within cancer care. In an era where precision medicine is paramount, there is a significant demand for RWD solutions like COTA’s to help life sciences organizations, providers, and payers streamline operations, fast-track R&D, and bring life-saving treatments to market more quickly.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Bahal affirmed:
“What makes COTA distinct is our high-quality data and the medical oncologists we involve at every stage of our data curation and analysis processes. In healthcare’s AI era, it’s more important than ever that the RWD we use is high quality. When AI extrapolates information from datasets at scale, any inaccuracies or missing information can lead to bias or hallucinations, undercutting trust in AI systems. At COTA, our experts ensure our RWD are accurate and complete, and they validate our AI results to ensure the information gleaned is reliable. We have also integrated AI into our own business processes, enhancing operational efficiency and fueling sustainable growth.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Bahal concluded:
“We’re a completely different company today than we were three years ago, and I believe today we have the right team in place and a strong financial position to take us into the future. As we continue to enhance our AI capabilities with CAILIN and bring even more data into our dataset – including previously unusable sources like unstructured data – we aim to unlock new opportunities for innovation and improve cancer care and outcomes for patients across the country.”
