Recruiting patients to clinical trials—especially people of color—has been an uphill battle. The goal of many startups is not only to expand access for ordinary people, but also to make the process more convenient.
It’s against this backdrop that New York and Los Angeles-based Topography Health launched its clinical trials platform last week with a $27.5 million Series A funding round. In its move out of stealth mode, it outlines a way to use community doctors for clinical trials. Traditionally, clinical trials are usually conducted at medical centers in centralized locations.
Topography from Anderson Horowitz and Bain Capital Ventures, which Lead investment with Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff, former Chief Medical Officer of Flatiron Health Bobby Greenand a medical founder Tom Lee also contributed. In 2020, Andreessen Horowitz led an initial $6 million seed round in Topography, the company revealed.
By working with community physicians across the U.S., they hope to make clinical drug trials accessible to more Americans with multiple medical conditions, ranging from Terminally ill to moderately chronic disease.It is hoped that this clinical trial model can achieve Marginalized communities have historically been underrepresented or excluded from clinical trials.
In addition, Topography’s platform will allow patients to participate in studies they previously had no access to due to limited study sites.
“We want to expand the availability of research to patients in a community setting. Sometimes the standard of care is very good. Sometimes, the standard of care is limited, like in cancer or Alzheimer’s,” said Topography Health CEO and Co-Founder Alexander Saing-Amand said. “When the standard of care is limited, it’s important for patients to have access to new treatments. Many don’t.”
Topography’s full-stack data science platform provides training and assistance to a national network of physicians to scale clinical drug trials by helping them reach patients in their communities who may benefit. Specifically, the platform recommends research, recruits patients, and supervises staff, alleviating the operational and administrative burden on physicians, and ultimately aims to provide clinical trials and their benefits to patients who need them.
“Community physicians have a strong relationship with patients. Patients trust their own physicians. We are providing these physicians with the people and software they need to conduct trials so that their patients can have the first opportunity for clinical research,” Saing-Amand said in an email. “The vast majority of physicians do not provide patients with the resources needed for clinical trials. This is especially true in community practices and underserved communities. “
Additionally, Topography’s digital workflow technology provides one place to manage all trial data in a central location, helping the process run more smoothly. Additionally, the platform enables physicians to develop a list of potential trials for each patient by analyzing patient records. Notably, Topography’s approach allows patients from historically marginalized communities to receive information on drug trials that can help them. As such, Topography envisions the technology providing a way to shape clinical trial outcomes to understand how drugs are performing in different communities, especially those historically overlooked in past trials.
Hopkins Biotechnology Network article Article published in November 2020 addresses the issue of not including different populations in clinical drug trials. For example, only 11% of patients in the Gilead-funded remdesivir trial (GS-YOU.S.-540-5773) were black Americans, even though Covid has disproportionately affected minorities, the report said.
“The lack of patient diversity in clinical trials is a huge bottleneck in the drug development process, and Topography addresses this problem by focusing on empowering physicians to effectively build clinical research and investigative capabilities into their core practice operations,” said Julie You, general partner, Andreessen Horowitz, in a press release. “As pharma and biotech funding booms, demand for new researchers also continues to outstrip supply, creating a huge opportunity to unlock new research capabilities for physicians and their patients.”
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