Aetion Appoints CEO and New Executive Chair of the Board

Dr. Jeremy Rassen, co-founder of Aetion and current board director, will resume his leadership role as Aetion's CEO

Dr. Christophe Berthoux brings international commercial and clinical research experience to Aetion as its new executive chair of the board

NEW YORK, Jan. 9, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Aetion, the global leader in real-world evidence (RWE) technology and analytics, today announced that it has confirmed the appointment of Jeremy Rassen, ScD, as chief executive officer (CEO) of Aetion. Dr. Rassen is a co-founder of the company and has been serving as interim CEO since June 2024. Additionally, Christophe Berthoux, DVM, former CEO of NAMSA, a contract research organization (CRO), joins Aetion as its new executive chair of the board, bringing a career of global healthcare leadership experience.

"Since co-founding the company in 2013, my goal has always been to ensure that Aetion creates the software to empower decision-makers across healthcare easily using deep scientific methods from causal inference and critical insights from AI, for all of the questions before them," said Dr. Rassen. "Every day, we transform real-world data into real-world evidence, and real-world evidence into decisions that drive all parts of a modern healthcare business. With the addition of Dr. Berthoux to our outstanding board, we are ideally positioned to deliver on our mission as the use of real-world evidence continues to grow and evolve."

Dr. Rassen is an epidemiologist and computer scientist with more than 25 years of experience in how causal inference and artificial intelligence (AI) can drive understanding of the safety, effectiveness and value of medical treatments. He co-founded Aetion to pursue a vision of technology providing the speed, scale and rigor required to answer high-stakes questions in healthcare. Dr. Rassen has overseen Aetion's work with 18 of the 20 top global pharma companies, as well as many other customers around healthcare. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he initiated Aetion's research collaborations with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and was a leading voice on how RWE could be applied to decisions around COVID-19 and other critical decisions in healthcare. Prior to Aetion, Dr. Rassen was an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he developed methods to improve the quality and validity of RWD studies. He started his career in Silicon Valley, where he was the first employee at E.piphany to join the company's founders to build a novel, data-driven customer relationship management (CRM) platform and sell it to Fortune 50 companies. Dr. Rassen received a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science from Harvard University and a Doctor of Science in Epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is a fellow and board member of the International Society of Pharmacoepidemiology. 

As a leader in the business of clinical research, Dr. Berthoux has worked in both the United States and Europe for more than 25 years. Prior to NAMSA, he served as board member for two years before briefly joining as CEO, Europe at Citoxlab in Paris, a CRO for non-clinical research. For the eight years prior, he held the position of CEO at Synexus Clinical Research Ltd, a multinational, clinical site management organization (SMO) based in London, where he was responsible for overhauling the company's management structure and business growth strategies. During a 20 year tenure at Charles River Laboratories, Dr. Berthoux held various positions in the U.S. and Europe, including executive vice president of sales and marketing and chief commercial officer. Berthoux received his Master of Business Administration from Purdue University Daniels School of Business in Indiana after completing his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree at the Ecole nationale vétérinaire de Lyon in France.

"As Aetion's new executive chair of the board, I look forward to contributing my global industry experience to help with the company's next phase of growth," said Dr. Berthoux. "Companies where a founder still serves in a CEO role are more innovative and willing to invest in the future. I am thrilled to collaborate with Dr. Rassen and the Aetion team, adding my expertise to his owner's mindset – pushing Aetion to the next level as the demand for real-world evidence continues to increase. In this new phase, we will redefine evidence generation and leverage AI to scale data-science driven technology to power healthcare decision-making."

"Through Dr. Rassen's return as CEO and Dr. Berthoux joining as executive chair of the Board, Aetion is gaining the invaluable combination of founder-driven vision and deep operational expertise essential for long-term success in the rapidly evolving healthcare landscape," said T.J. Carella, managing director at Warburg Pincus and board director at Aetion. "Aetion's experienced leadership team and deep bench of leading subject matter experts power the company as the market-maker in transforming real-world data into real-world evidence."

"This next phase of Aetion's leadership advances its position as the market leader in converting real-world evidence into impactful decisions," said Scott Gottlieb, MD, partner at New Enterprise Associates, member of Aetion's board of directors and 23rd commissioner of the FDA. "By harnessing its best-in-class analytics platform, Aetion offers a disruptive approach for delivering AI-powered, decision-grade evidence that supports every facet of modern healthcare decision making."

About Aetion
Aetion is a healthcare analytics company that delivers real-world evidence for the manufacturers, purchasers, and regulators of medical treatments and technologies. Aetion's suite of real-world data analytics applications analyzes data from the real world to produce transparent, rapid, and scientifically validated answers on safety, effectiveness and value. Founded by Harvard Medical School faculty members with decades of experience in epidemiology and health outcomes research, Aetion informs healthcare's most critical decisions—what works best, for whom and when—to guide product development, commercialization and payment innovation. The company's investors include Flare Capital Partners, NEA, Warburg Pincus, B Capital and a number of leading life sciences and payer partners. Learn more at aetion.com and follow us on LinkedIn.

SOURCE Aetion