As the Covid-19 pandemic causes more companies to switch to decentralized clinical trials, investors are investing money in a software company that wants to simplify these processes. Reify Health recently raised US$220 million in a Series C financing led by Coatue Management, a technology-focused investment company, with a valuation of US$2.2 billion.
The Boston-based company was founded in 2012 with the goal of making it easier for patients to participate in trials and expanding access through more websites.
“The things we are doing, and the future of clinical trials as a whole, are not just scattered trials,” Reify executive chairman Michael Lin said in a press release. “We need to have a global healthcare system that proactively reach out to patients around the world and mobilize the necessary resources to conduct trials for them.”
Reify’s business is divided into two parts: StudyTeam, its patient registration management platform, and Care Access Research, its subsidiaries conduct decentralized clinical trials.
According to the company, so far, StudyTeam has won the business of a number of large biopharmaceutical companies, including Amgen, AstraZeneca, and Eli Lilly, and is used in 4,000 clinical trial locations. The software can help biopharmaceutical companies understand how to recruit more quickly and avoid the “wait and wait” problem, which can be time-consuming to recruit enough patients when there are few available trial sites. It also reduces redundant tasks, such as researchers manually copying registration information from their system to the clinical trial sponsor’s log.
“In the early days, we spent years trying to understand this question: why the clinical Is research still a destructive bottleneck for drug development? “Reify CEO Ralph Passarella (Ralph Passarella) said in a press release. “It is clear that slow and unpredictable patient enrollment is at the core of the problem. If we want to continue recruiting trials for 3 to 4 months instead of 18 months, we must achieve two key goals. First, we must be able to quickly identify enough patients of interest. Second, we must enable these patients to participate in relevant trials. “
Reify’s other business, Care Access, aims to help solve the latter problem. Since 2015, it has established more than 60 test sites. Ahman Namvargolian, CEO of Care Access, said that it has also begun to use mobile site vehicles to bring trials to more locations in the United States, and will soon be conducted in more countries/regions.
Reify plans to use the new funds to develop these two businesses, After raising $30 million last year.
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