In October, our company cheered as our vice chairman of Life Sciences & Healthcare/co-founder of our MEDIDATA brand, Glen de Vries, realized his lifelong dream by taking part in a suborbital flight to the edge of space aboard a Blue Origin rocket.
In November, our company experienced shock and sadness when Glen died in a plane crash. With his death, we lost an extraordinary man: a scientist, an entrepreneur, an adventurer. Glen believed that science and digital technology help advance humanity. This belief fueled his ambition to found Medidata Solutions in 1999, with the vision of evolving traditional approaches to medicine into precision medicine. Dassault Systèmes acquired the company in 2019 to add its platform for clinical development into our portfolio to extend our mission to lead the digital transformation of life sciences & healthcare. MEDIDATA’s platform fuels tens of thousands of clinical trials involving millions of patients. It is helping redefine how these trials work, such as by developing synthetic control arms, a revolutionary method that eliminates the need to enroll control participants in clinical trials by replacing them with virtual patients. And its solutions played a crucial role in the development Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.
Glen had a life-long fascination with the sciences, especially anything related to aerospace, chemistry and astronomy. His hobbies included building model planes and rockets, and earning his pilot’s license. He was clearly elated when he got to board Blue Origin to experience something very few humans ever have. His did this not just for himself: he wanted to use this experience as a platform to broadcast his belief that space exploration can help evolve how we approach the challenges we face on Earth. He believed we’d see new ways to solve our problems by seeing from above that there are no true borders, and that we are one human race who must take care of each other. He wanted science, math and technology to fuel the innovation needed to solve humanity’s greatest challenges. And as a proof point, he used his trip on Blue Origin to spread awareness about what Water.org is doing on this planet to help the one in nine humans who don’t have access to safe water.
While we truly miss Glen and mourn the loss of how he could further change our world, we want to celebrate and honor his legacy of democratizing space to benefit us all. We invite you to watch the following short video to hear his vision in his own words.
