Enabling Next-Generation AI in Autoimmune R&D.

Dr. Ghazanfar (Sunny) Khan is the Chief Medical Officer at Evidation. A physician and global health leader, he brings experience in clinical practice, public health, digital health innovation, and large-scale data integration. Before joining Evidation, he was Executive Director of Digital Health at Our Future Health, the UK’s largest health research program, where he led integration of data from more than a million participants. Previously, he was Head of Clinical at Mendelian, a digital health company advancing rare disease diagnosis within the NHS, and led global initiatives at the World Health Organization, including development of a digital platform that supported essential health services during the COVID-19 pandemic.  He was previously appointed as Visiting Scholar and Faculty Affiliate at Harvard Medical School’s Center for Primary Care, where his work focused on the use of patient-generated data in clinical decision-making.

Dr. Khan earned his medical degree with Honors from the University of Leeds, is a Member of the Royal College of General Practitioners, and holds a Master of Public Health with Distinction from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Kahkeshan Hijazi, PhD is a Senior Expert in Data Science and Translational Bioinformatics at Novartis Institutes of Biomedical Research. She leads data science efforts across multiple clinical programs, applying AI-driven and statistical approaches to multi-omics, clinical, and biomarker data to support precision medicine and drug development across immune-mediated and inflammatory diseases. Her work focuses on translating high-dimensional data into actionable biological insight to inform clinical strategy and decision-making, while also contributing to the development of scalable data science capabilities in pharma R&D.

Spandan is working at the intersection of immunology, pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics, and applied AI in biotherapeutic drug development. He began his academic career studying immune cell signaling, gaining a deep mechanistic understanding of how immune pathways are regulated in health and disease.

In the pharmaceutical industry, his work has focused on translational DMPK and pharmacodynamic biomarker strategies for biologics, supporting dose selection and decision-making in autoimmune and inflammatory programs. More recently, he has been leveraging AI-assisted coding and modern software tools to build lightweight web applications and internal platforms that simplify data integration, analysis, and communication across drug development teams.

Through this combination of domain expertise and hands-on AI development, Spandan is driving next-generation R&D workflows for biotherapeutics—bridging biological insight, quantitative modeling, and practical digital solutions.