Meet Vice President of Product Development Mike Italia
When Mike Italia joined Syapse in 2014, he was the first employee in the company’s Philadelphia office. Today, he leads a rapidly growing team of engineers, product managers, and others in a new office set to accommodate 40 employees. In this interview, Mike explains what initially drew him to the company, describes what it’s like to collaborate remotely with the rest of the Syapse team, and shares some of the unique technical challenges of working in precision medicine.
Why did you join Syapse?
I started my career in the pharmaceutical industry — in the research division, building software to bring together clinical data and genomic data to support research efforts and new drug development. I transitioned from that into working in translational research in a hospital setting. So I was doing a lot of similar work, but now much closer to patients; I started off very far removed from a patient who would get a drug, and then in the research institute in a hospital, I was much, much closer to the clinic. One of the things that was exciting about Syapse is I feel like precision medicine is really the culmination of all of that. It’s about taking tools and some of these things that were really research-oriented, and bringing them to the clinic — and bringing them to bear on cancer.
What motivates you in your work?
Right out of school, I’d landed my first job, and I was on top of the world. It was an exciting time; working at big pharmaceutical company, lots of interesting work, exactly what I wanted to be doing. And at that exact same time, my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In the span of year, he died. That was a life-changing event for me, and it really drove home the point that all of us have a very short time here. We have to spend our days working on things that matter — and with a sense of urgency, because you might not have tomorrow. That’s what keeps me going.
What role do software engineers play in precision medicine?
What we’re doing is really enabling clinicians to give better care — and we’re using software to do that. Medicine is increasingly becoming a very data-driven discipline, and because clinicians are human beings, it’s becoming harder and harder for them to keep track of all the various pieces of information that go into the care of a cancer patient. It’s a very complicated landscape, and it’s getting more complicated every day. You have this incredible intersection between the availability of IT, the actual clinical practice of doing genetic sequencing for tumors, and the targeted therapies that drug companies are developing. Put all that together and it just changes everything. Our job is to build software that helps clinicians deliver care to their patients in this very complex environment that’s only going to get more complex.
Tell us about the technical problems the Product Development team is solving.
A lot of the technical challenges we have are around getting data in, creating appropriate data models, and understanding how data is used. Also understanding the quality of the data; there’s a lot of performance challenges. We want to get as much data as possible, and so we need to ensure that we can reliably and quickly process that information. Those, I think, are some of the biggest challenges that we have.
And from a user interface and design perspective, a lot of the types of interfaces that we need to build are challenging. A lot of the things that we’re trying to do, people have not done before. It’s not like you can go on the web and just Google a bunch of examples. So there’s a lot of room to do creative new things, I think, no matter what part of Syapse an engineer works on. There’s going to be a lot of new things and new challenges and new problems that you’ve never encountered before.
How do the Philly and San Francisco teams collaborate?
Since the early days of the Philly office — when I was the only member of the Philly office — we’ve always had a lot of video conferencing. And we’ve continued with doing that, and so collaboration is actually really good. I mean, it’s not the same as in person, but you can at least get to know folks by face, not just on the phone. We use a lot of conference rooms with large TVs and cameras. We really try to use video conferencing wherever we can, even for short meetings. It’s just nice to be able to see the people you work with day in and day out. We’re also heavy users of Slack. Being able to message people who are in another office, especially with time zone differences — people are commuting and they just miss you, or you just miss them — it’s nice to be able to shoot a quick message and have that quick sync up that you might need to get. So that’s what we do, those are the technical ways.
And then we travel. We like to have visitors in Philly; we bring people to Philly from the San Francisco office and have them work here for a week or so. And then a lot of folks from Philly travel to San Francisco pretty regularly and meet with colleagues there. So I think that the combination of all of those things allows us to really build some good cross-office communication.
What sets Syapse apart from other companies in this space?
There are a lot of differences, but if I had to single out one major difference, it would be the focus on the present and the here and now — the sense of urgency. One of the things that really drives us is that we know there are cancer patients out there today who can benefit from precision medicine. So we want to get our software out there to their physicians and get people on precision medicine therapies. It’s that sense of urgency and that focus on what’s happening today — what can we do today to improve the lives of patients. Not what’s going to happen five years from now, when there’s all kinds of advances that we’re banking on. A lot of companies are focused on the long term; we’re looking at how do we do something today.
If you’d like to learn more about working at Syapse with amazing coworkers like Mike Italia, visit our careers page at https://syapse.com/company/careers/
