Peter Stroyer Pallesen was the first person employed by Insife when Martin Holm-Petersen started the company in 2017. After a long career at NNIT, looking after the pharmacovigilance IT needs of large Danish pharma Novo Nordisk, Peter was the perfect person to work alongside Martin, creating Insife’s revolutionary PV solution HALOPV. So, how did he become the company’s Chief Architect?
‘I grew up in a small city in the west of Denmark and there wasn’t much to do. It was either football or messing about with computers. I chose the latter.’
Peter’s family got their first PC when he was only 10 years old, and although it was mainly commandeered by his elder brothers, Peter managed to steal time on it whenever he was able. It very quickly became his passion and he spent all the time he could playing with programmes and games, trying to make things work and troubleshooting problems. When the internet arrived, the options for learning how to programme and fix things became easier as he tapped into global knowledge and educated himself even faster. Computers became his life and he loved the logic that they run on, something he didn’t find all the time in people.
‘I was pretty young when I realised that I prefer machines to humans! I learned so much from spending time tinkering and I really don’t think you can get that from a formal education. With computers, I think you learn by doing.’
Unsurprisingly, Peter went on to study Information Science at university and then started applying for jobs in many different industries, unsure about where to take his considerable IT skills. But he was offered a job in NNIT and thus found himself starting his career in pharma and PV.
Not many people spend 14 years in their first job
It’s a rare thing for anyone to spend 14 years in their first job, but Peter puts his longevity down to the fact that he loves to be an expert in whatever he does. Once he started in PV, he wanted to develop his knowledge base and truly learn everything about that area of business.
‘I thrive when I know everything about the subject matter I’m working on. I dig very deep into the details and work well when I have a full understanding.’
Of course, his roles changed and grew in stature over the years, but they were all focused on PV. His expertise in IT for drug safety grew as he developed the systems for NNIT, as well as his broader knowledge of all areas of the pharma industry. His final role, as Senior Application Manager at the company saw Peter leading a global team of technical consultants working within IT in PV.
So, what made him leave after 14 years and move to the brand-new company Insife?
Moving to Insife
Peter had known Insife founder Martin Holm-Petersen for several years, as Martin had worked at Novo Nordisk and was, in effect, a customer of Peter at NNIT. After Martin had been developing his new product on his own for six months, he approached Peter and asked him to join him. Peter wasn’t sure.
‘Initially I thought absolutely not! But we met and Martin showed me what he had already built and I was so impressed. It was amazing.’
Peter took the plunge and joined as Insife’s first employee, becoming a partner in the business. Martin had by then developed the solution to a certain stage and had excellent knowledge of the industry and what potential pharma customers would want and need. It was Peter’s job to make the technology work.
‘Martin brought the ideas and I helped develop them. It was a great partnership.’
In the early days, it was not just the technology that needed developing, there was also a company to create. So that included infrastructure, procedures, compliance, security and all the internal IT, as well as the HALOPV system. But they worked fast and amazingly their first customer had a system delivered to them with just Martin and Peter working on it. Peter thinks their fast success was down to their combined decades of experience.
Over the last seven years, Peter’s role has of course changed as Insife has grown exponentially. He is now Chief Architect and System Owner of HALOPV, overseeing the full technical team and the complete design and development of the revolutionary solution. He still struggles to stop himself getting completely hands on.
‘Sometimes I can’t stop myself getting into the details. We’re still a relatively small group of developers concentrating on the core product and I just like to get involved in the minutiae.’
It’s the company’s growth over the last seven years that seems most extraordinary to Peter. When he and Martin were first working together, they were purely developing systems for the parts of PV that weren’t being covered by other solutions. However now, HALOPV is a fully fledged end-to-end solution, that does everything other systems can do and much more.
‘Each project we took on during the early days seemed impossible, particularly with such a small team. But we succeeded each time as the projects grew in size. And our offering grew along with the projects.’
Future developments
The global growth of the use of AI is what Peter thinks is the most obvious potential development for PV systems moving forward. There have been many projects in PV that have used AI already but he feels strongly that there’s a lot more to do, as long as data security and regulatory compliance can be upheld, which of course cannot be assumed in systems like ChatGPT.
‘ChatGPT can technically do pretty much all of what we might need in our PV solutions, but security is of course a big issue. So, at some point, we need to find a safe and compliant way of using it or maybe we need to build our own, completely secure, bespoke version of it?’
Peter and the Insife team might just be the perfect people for the job.