How Lithero is using AI to speed up pharma marketing compliance
Startup profile: Lithero
Founded by: Nyron Burke
Year founded: 2015
Headquarters: Philadelphia, PA
Sector: Life sciences, AI
Funding and valuation: $0.68 million raised as of May 2022, according to PitchBook
Key ecosystem partners: Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Morgan Lewis, Drexel University, University City Science Center, Broad Street Angels, Ic@3401
In life sciences, everything takes longer.
Nyron Burke, cofounder and CEO of the Philadelphia-based AI for life sciences company Lithero, learned that through years of working as a consultant with pharmaceutical companies that were always looking for ways to speed up the process of creating marketing materials.
What may seem relatively simple, like a pharmaceutical pamphlet for a doctor's office, can take months to finalize due to compliance issues. The final draft, with its medical language and side effects disclosures, has to be just right, requiring multiple reviews by medical lawyers before it goes to print.
It's a stark contrast to consumer marketing, where a marketing professional might be able to create a one-pager in a day.
'With life sciences, that just wasn't possible,' Burke told Technical.ly, noting that the extra time it takes to make biotech marketing materials compliant also increases the cost tenfold.
Burke founded Lithero in 2015, years before AI became a common part of everyday life. He knew that machine learning could make the process considerably faster by screening for compliance issues before a medical lawyer reviews it, cutting down on the number of reviews — and, crucially, time.
'Divine intervention' led to the development of the engine
Before Lithero, Burke spent eight years working for the global professional services company Accenture, with a focus on pharma and biotech companies.
'The three things I spent my consulting career on were speed, cost and compliance in pharma marketing specifically,' he said. 'But with the aspirations that my clients had, I had to not just do a good job, but to fundamentally do something that was transformative.'
The speed he wanted for his clients was impossible in the 2010s — each human review for compliance was necessary, but time-consuming.
AI, Burke said, had no hype around it in 2015 when he had the idea to use it to help achieve the speed he was looking for. The one thing holding him back was that he didn't know enough about AI to build an engine that could do what he needed to do.
Then he met Brandon Morton, an AI researcher at Drexel who was working on his doctorate at the time.
'We met at church randomly,' Burke said. 'It was like divine intervention … His research is really what powered our ability to actually do what we're doing.'
Morton effectively became a cofounder of Lithero. Even with his leadership, Burke said, it was a challenge.
'AI is very, very difficult,' Burke said. 'People don't appreciate the beauty and the power of the human mind and how hard it is to get machines to simulate what we do.'
An AI assistant that doesn't hallucinate
The technology Lithero created is called LARA, Lithero Artificial Review Assistant.
'You could think of it sort of like an artificial lawyer,' Burke said. Once LARA has all of a client's necessary information, it essentially pre-screens the content. It's not meant to replace the client's human lawyer, just to make it so that the lawyer has less to do on each individual piece of marketing. Then, he said, LARA will understand the client-specific content well enough that the client can use the tool for other things as well, such as creating annotations and comparing content to customer behavioral data.
While today people tend to think of large language model generative AI like ChatGPT when they think of AI, LARA still isn't generative — it doesn't generate content based on prompts, it is a screening and correlation tool that can be trained to know everything about a specific brand. As such, it is not susceptible to drawbacks like hallucinations, when an AI model randomly answers with false information presented as fact, often a result of insufficient data or bias.
The public launch of generative AI did help the company, though, by making the concept of an AI tool less obscure.
'It has normalized what we're doing,' Burke said. 'We're in a very conservative, cautious, slow industry — it changed the conversations that I was having.'
Now, he says, there is a lot of demand, and a lot of clients bringing them new ideas on how the company can continue to grow.
'Our future is not just compliance, it's also creative,' Burke said. 'We recently launched some creative assistants, and are seeing this amazing amount of excitement.'
From one to ten
To get to where Lithero is today, with a team of ten and a growing roster of clients, it spent years based at Ic@3401, a University City coworking and incubation space sponsored by Drexel University and the University City Science Center that closed in 2024.
One of its earliest investors, apart from friends and family, was Ben Franklin Technology Partners. Burke also credits its law firm Morgan Lewis as a big supporter, as well as angel investment group Broad Street Angels.
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