Keeping Patients Connected with AI
As chief commercial officer for the life sciences division at Hippocratic AI, Peter Casasanto (B.S. ’02, biological sciences; B.A. ’02, criminology and criminal justice) taps into the power of artificial intelligence to provide 24/7 support to patients and healthcare providers whenever and wherever they need it.
From pharmaceutical research to strategic partnerships and business collaborations, Peter Casasanto (B.S. ’02, biological sciences; B.A. ’02, criminology and criminal justice) has dedicated his 20-plus-year career to fighting disease and improving healthcare. For him, that means more than developing new drugs and more effective therapies; it’s also about finding better ways to support patients—even when they’re not in the doctor’s office.
“At the end of the day, we’re all patients. We have constant questions in healthcare, but we don’t always get the answers we’re looking for,” he said. “Imagine all the times you’ve tried to call in to your doctor, and you sit on the line forever, then you wait 48 hours to get a call back because you just need to know something like, ‘Hey, I’m experiencing this, what should I do? or ‘I missed a drug dose, should I double up on it?’ We’ve all had experiences where you call into these interactive voice systems, and you’re like, ‘I need to speak to a representative,’ but they don’t understand what you’re saying. We just don’t have enough healthcare support, clinician support or doctor support.”
Casasanto believes healthcare needs a new kind of support system, a system where clinical support is partnered with powerful artificial intelligence (AI). As chief commercial officer for the life sciences division at Hippocratic AI, he’s advancing a next-generation healthcare model that leverages the power of AI to connect patients with the help they need.
“Hippocratic AI partners with hospital systems, pharma, and med tech companies to deploy generative AI healthcare agents that meet patients where they are — available 24/7 along their care journey,” he said. “The agents call patients and physicians on behalf of those organizations, always disclosing upfront that they're AI. They don't diagnose, and they're not a replacement for a doctor or nurse. They handle the work that keeps care on track: scheduling appointments, explaining medications, reminding patients to refill prescriptions, and answering questions whenever they come up.”
Through his years of work in pharma and biotech, Casasanto saw the many ways AI was becoming a game-changer for drug discovery and the development of targeted, patient-centric therapeutics. Now, he sees AI making a similar impact on patient support. The company ethos is “Clinical Abundance”, where, for the first time in human history, gen AI can help bridge scarcity with healthcare abundance and help close the growing shortage of healthcare workers worldwide.
“Safety and accuracy are embedded into every layer of the platform, making Hippocratic AI uniquely capable of scaling high-quality care,” Casasanto noted. “We were just on the Forbes list as the number two healthcare startup, so it’s a really exciting time right now.”
From forensics to cell biology
In 1997, when Casasanto began college at the University of Maryland, he envisioned a career in forensic science at the FBI. But as he tapped into the unique learning opportunities in UMD’s College Park Scholars program, he began to see a niche for himself in cell biology and molecular genetics and a career path that could lead him toward drug development and biotechnology.
“The more I dug deeper into the science at UMD and started learning more about the pharma industry, medtech and the diagnostics industry, the more that’s kind of where my study led me. I found myself focusing on the business applications and how to marry that up with the science,” he explained. “I really started to get a grasp of, wow, this is really a whole new world, especially on the life sciences side, and it really kind of propelled me into this whole world of the pharmaceutical and biotech industry.”
After graduating from UMD, Casasanto went on to earn a master’s degree in biomedical chemistry at Thomas Jefferson University and an MBA in pharmaceutical management at Drexel University. Along the way, he became a research immunologist at Merck, supporting the pharma’s vaccine portfolio.
“I was a part of the launches of some of the newer vaccines, and these were big drug launches for Merck, which is one of the leading companies in vaccines. So, I got to experience what a drug launch was like from the inside, which is a pretty rare feat,” he recalled. “I was part of a group that was doing all the biomarker testing that was used in the clinical trials that would determine whether the vaccine would have efficacy for patients. So, you learn a lot quickly.”
Leveraging the power of AI
By 2009, Casasanto was applying his clinical lab experiences to a strategic development role at Global CRO PPD, Inc., Thermo Fisher Scientific’s clinical research business. From there, he went on to business leadership roles at Labcorp and NeoGenomics Laboratories, where his clinical experience in pharma and the foundation in biology he developed at UMD helped him drive diagnostics and business collaborations.
“I don’t think I would have been as successful if I’d just jumped into a sales role without having that background in both science and pharma,” he said. “It really helped me to understand the drug applications and put myself in the shoes of the people we were trying to forge partnerships with, because I understood their needs and how we could really shepherd these drugs to the market.”
In 2020, Casasanto moved on to Tempus AI, leveraging AI and machine learning to advance the development of precision medicines.
“By that time, Tempus AI was at the forefront, a pioneer in the real-world evidence side of that business, trying to understand how patients will respond to a certain therapy across specific areas, based on factors like their demographics, history and clinical background, but also their specific genetic makeup—their DNA and RNA,” he said. “And you need AI to be able to run these models; the human brain simply can’t do this. So, this ability of AI to come in and decipher and really understand large datasets is game-changing.”
Casasanto continued to lead AI initiatives in biotech for the next several years before joining Hippocratic AI in 2025. Now one of the fastest-growing startups in healthcare, the company is partnering with more than 60 large healthcare systems, payers and life sciences companies globally. By connecting the company’s AI model with all aspects of the healthcare business, Casasanto sees endless possibilities ahead.
“I love this intersection of patients, HCPs and drug manufacturers, plus data and AI, and I think, frankly, we’re just scratching the surface of AI,” he said. “It’s a brave new world out there, and it’s moving so fast that it’s hard for me to even imagine what it will look like even six to 12 months from now,” he said. “This is still the area I want to focus on in my career because it’s just going to get more sophisticated; these models are going to get smarter and smarter, and we’ve built them so they have checks and balances. They’re going to know everything about you and your healthcare situation that you consent to, to help you lead a healthier life.”
