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Geoff Kim Opens India Cancer Hospital to Prove Out AI Drug Study Software
By Tom Kagy | 03 Jul, 2025
FDA experience reviewing clinical trials for cancer drugs helped Kim's Pi Health develop AI software to help pharmaceutical firms streamline the long, costly drug review process.
The process of recruiting patients for clinical trials, then distilling FDA regulatory filings from massive study data, is brutally costly and time-consuming for even deep-pocketed pharmaceutical firms. No one knows this better than Dr Geoff Kim who spent seven years with the FDA reviewing thousands of such clinical trials.
That tortuous process inspired Kim to pitch the concept of Pi Health to BeOne Medicines. BeOne's CEO saw the potential for a company that could help pharmas speed up the drug approval process, and hired Kim and his colleague Bobby Reddy in 2019 to develop the software. Kim suggested that opening a cancer hospital in India would prove a valuable asset to address one of the bottlenecks in drug clinical trials, recruiting patients.
“There are all these new and exciting ways to attack cancer," Kim told Forbes. "If we can do [the clinical trials] faster and cheaper and get therapies out to patients, we want to do it now because there are people waiting right now.”
That bottleneck is due to the fact that in the US the number of drugs in development chasing patients for clinical studies has ballooned from 9,737 in 2010 to 23,875 in 2024, according to Citeline as reported by Forbes. During that span, the number of patients enrolled in trials barely grew from 655,000 to 764,000, as only about 8.5% of cancer patients sign up for clinical trials.
Adding to the congestion is that the number of companies doing drug development ballooned from 2,207 to 6,823. And most seek to hold their clinical trials in the few US hospitals, generally in the New York City and Boston areas, recognized for that purpose in hopes of gaining some advantage in the drug approval process. This geographical concentration is a major factor behind the low sign-up rate for clinical trial patients.
Seeing the advantages of accessing a different patient pool and hospital facilities outside the US market, Kim decided to build a modern cancer hospital in Hyderabad, India, not only as a facility to accommodate clinical trials but as a testbed on which to deploy their AI-powered clinical trial software. The modern 30-bed cancer hospital, now named the Pi Health Cancer Hospital, was completed in 2023. The next year BeOne (then BeiGene) spun off Pi Health with Kim as CEO and Reddy as COO.
Since 2024 Pi Health has already participated in eight clinical trials, including one for BeOne. One of those led to the approval of a drug for head, neck and lung cancer for sale in India in only seven months, less than half the usual time.
Much of the time savings is credited to Pi Health’s software which combines all clinical trial data into one place, reducing errors while streamlines the process from trial design through regulatory submission. The AI is able to check data for discrepancies and errors while automating notetaking and clinical documentation from data.
This first successful approval, Kim believes, not only validates the Pi Health software but will prove helpful in attracting more trials.
PI Health, based in Cambridge, Mass., has raised $40 million in financing that implies a $100 million valuation. 40% is still held by its parent BeOne which has a $30 billion market cap. Pi Health has already booked contracts worth $70 million for nearly 20 clinical studies. BeOne itself is one of the global pharmaceutical companies among Pi Health's five big pharma clients.
Seeing the advantages of accessing a different patient pool and hospital facilities outside the US market, Kim decided to build a modern cancer hospital in Hyderabad, India, not only as a facility to accommodate clinical trials but as a testbed on which to deploy their AI-powered clinical trial software.
Pi Health COO Bobby Reddy, MD, (left) and CEO Geoff Kim
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