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Cyrus Mehta (left) and Nitin Patel (right) at Cytel’s 25th anniversary banquet. Creators of Pioneering Software and Clinical Services Company Look Back and to the Future CHANCE magazine invited Cyrus Mehta and Nitin Patel of Cytel, Inc. to talk with Scott Evans, executive editor of CHANCE. Cytel is a pioneer in the development of software for exact methods, clinical trial design including adaptive designs, and statistical consulting and services. Mehta and Patel discuss their background, the challenges of developing and maintaining Cytel, and what they have learned on their journey. Evans: Please tell me about your backgrounds and I was still a student in India, we really became friends how you met. at MIT. I’ve learned a lot from him both about how to conduct original research and about how to live well. Mehta: We are both from Bombay, India, and went to high school and undergraduate college in Bombay, Patel: I obtained my bachelor’s degree in Electrical followed by graduate studies at MIT. I got my bach- Engineering at the Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute elor’s degree in Civil Engineering at the Indian Insti- (VJTI) of Bombay University. VJTI was set up in 1887 tute of Technology, Bombay, and my master’s and PhD to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee and is in Operations Research at MIT. I learned statistics on one of the oldest engineering colleges in India. On the job. Although I had met Nitin once or twice when graduation, I joined MIT, which incidentally was CHANCE 51 Ahmedabad, or IIMA, as it’s popularly known in Cyrus Mehta is co-founder and president of Cytel Inc. and adjunct India. We had become friends when we were doctoral professor of Biostatistics, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public students at the Operations Research Center at MIT. Health. He is recognized internationally for his research on exact In 1977, Professor Mosteller at Harvard recruited permutational inference, group sequential designs and adaptive Marvin Zelen and the entire Department of Biostatistics designs for clinical trials. He is a Fellow of the ASA and an elected at SUNY Buffalo (which I understand was referred to member of the International Statistical Institute. as “Marvin’s Baseball Team”). Marvin went to Carnegie Nitin Patel is co-founder, chair, and chief technology officer of Mellon University to talk about the research he and his team were doing in biostatistics at the Harvard School Cytel and has been a visiting professor at MIT and at Harvard of Public Health. Cyrus was blown away—he wanted to for several years. He has focused on research at the intersection play on the baseball team! He was thrilled when Marvin of statistics, operations research, and computer science. He is invited him to join, but there was a hitch: Someone had a Fellow of the ASA and a Fellow of the Computer Society of to be found to teach the courses Cyrus was scheduled India. He is a past president of the Operations Research Society to teach in the coming semester. of India and has also served as vice president of the International Cyrus wrote to me, asking if I would like to come Federation of Operational Research Societies. to Pittsburgh as visiting faculty to teach his courses. I readily agreed, as I thought it would be an interesting experience for me; my wife, Tehmi; and our three-year- old son Aneesh. During the semester, I made a trip to Cambridge and stayed with Cyrus and Satu. At one point in our conversation, Cyrus described established in 1861. After earning a master’s degree in two problems in computational statistics that Marvin Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an had suggested to him. We decided to work together to MBA from the Sloan School there, I went to work at try to solve them. Fortuitously for us, these problems Bonner and Moore Associates, a consulting and soft- were ideally matched to our strengths. We were able to ware company in Houston, a company that pioneered combine ideas from statistics, operations research, and in building operations research (OR) models for the computer science to develop solutions to them. I should oil and gas industry and developed some of the earliest point out that the operations research component drew commercial Linear Programming software. heavily on the “branch-and-bound” method created by It was there that I had my first experience of building John Little, my doctoral dissertation adviser at MIT. statistical models for practical applications. I had the Cyrus and I kept up our research collaboration for good fortune to work on a four-person team to develop several years after I returned to India. In those days, a commercial Monte Carlo simulation software pack- there was no Internet and the telecom service to India age in FORTRAN for analyzing risk in capital invest- was expensive and of poor quality, so we had to use ments for the production and exploration of oil and gas. snail mail. Fortunately, thanks to the generous support I returned to India, where I was a member of the of Harvard and IIMA, we were able to schedule visits founding management team of Tata Consultancy Ser- by me to Cambridge during summer breaks, and by vices. I came back to MIT after a six-year break to study Cyrus to Ahmedabad during the December holiday. for a PhD in OR alongside Cyrus. From those days Pralay Senchaudhuri and Yogesh Gajjar were then up to today, his extraordinary drive and energy, and his on the staff of the IIMA computer center and provided gift for clarity and focus in writing, have been inspiring us with excellent programming support. This arrange- to me. I was at the British Museum last year when I ment worked only because of the exceptional patience came across an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic which and understanding of our families, who had to put up immediately brought Cyrus to mind. It said: “By day, with drastic reductions in holiday time with us. write with your fingers; recite by night. Befriend the We were able to publish papers on a range of non- scroll and the palette—it’s more fulfilling than wine!” parametric problems in computational statistics. A number of statisticians urged Cyrus to develop an Evans: How did Cytel get started? industrial strength software product based on our work. They suggested applying for a Small Business Patel: The key event that led to the creation of Cytel Innovation Research Grant and offered to write letters in 1987 actually occurred a decade earlier. In 1977, of support. This led Cyrus to ask me if I was willing to Cyrus was a young assistant professor in the business move to Cambridge to start a company with him. school at the University of Pittsburgh and I was a fac- For Tehmi and me, it meant settling far away from ulty member at the Indian Institute of Management, our aging parents. For me, it would be a major career VOL. 29.3, 2016 52 change to switch from teaching at a management Both packages rely on network algorithms that school in India to developing software in the U.S. On Nitin and I pioneered and published in the 1980s. The the other hand, it was a unique opportunity that also software produces valid inferences for small, sparse, and held promise for a much better education for our sons imbalanced datasets, where conventional large-sample Aneesh and Arjun; particularly Aneesh, who had mus- methods may be unreliable. cular dystrophy. We decided we would go. East is a package for the design and interim moni- Pralay was happy to join the team while working for toring of group sequential and adaptive clinical trials. his doctoral degree at Harvard. Yogesh decided to enroll All three packages are widely used in the biopharma- at Northeastern as a master’s student in Computer ceutical industry. Science and work with us under their apprenticeship This phase gave us a solid foundation for future suc- program. We adopted Tehmi’s suggestion of Cytel for cess. Our software was innovative and our manuals were the company’s name (“Cy” from Cyrus and “tel” from well-written, so we won the respect of our statistical Patel), and we were ready to roll! colleagues and were able to penetrate into most major Cytel started in the ground-floor apartment of pharmaceutical companies, academic centers, and gov- Cyrus’s house in Cambridge. Tehmi and I, with our two ernment organizations both in the U.S. and overseas. sons, inaugurated the location by sleeping there on our Now, you must understand that getting well-known first night after arriving in Cambridge, with Aneesh on and respected is not the same as making a profit. We a folding bed and the rest of us in sleeping bags. relied on the SBIR grant program to fund much of our R&D. There were severe challenges to staying Mehta: I belong to the Zoroastrian community, a solvent and meeting payroll. We’d be flush with cash tiny ethnic group that migrated to India from Persia as soon as a new version of one of our products came in the 10th century. Our community has a tradition of out, since our customers were eager to upgrade. Then, starting and owning businesses. I had this ambition once everyone had upgraded, we were left with the from my early boyhood. My opportunity came in 1987 more-difficult problem of finding new customers in a when I heard about the Federal Government’s Small fairly specialized market. Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.

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