H1 launched its test landscape feature to help pharmaceutical companies determine suitable locations and physician investigators for the test. Photo source: H1
Last year, a large pharmaceutical company contacted H1. They are in phase 2 clinical trials and want to know how diverse their doctors are.
It was on the eve of the general election and the Covid-19 vaccine was currently under development. Many articles raise the question: Is this process sufficiently inclusive and will people accept it?
“It’s all because of the call we received. We finally did it,” Ariel Katz, CEO and co-founder of H1, said in an interview.
What they found: Of the thousands of doctors who conducted the experiment, most were white men. This process prompted H1 to build a broader function to help pharmaceutical companies identify different doctors and plan trials more effectively.
H1, headquartered in New York, has established a platform for doctors and researchers. The company recently launched a product called H1 Trial Landscape to help pharmaceutical companies find the best researchers and clinical trial locations.
For example, the company will be able to view information about doctors’ past research or clinical trials. They can also view demographic information about doctors, the languages they speak, and the diseases they treat, which can help pharmaceutical companies figure out who they might recruit for trials.
“We can use the vast amount of information we collect to construct various parts of the puzzle,” he said.
It also includes some logistical considerations. For example, a company running a CAR-T test wants to know whether industrial refrigerators can be used at the test site.
In the past, the process of organizing these things was time-consuming, and it was necessary to contact office managers one by one and ask them to fill out questionnaires.
“They did send the same form,” he said. “They all store this information separately, and they all ask about it separately.”
H1 has already attracted some users for this feature, including CRO TrialSpark in New York. Katz said some unnamed top 10 pharmaceutical companies are also using it.
At the end of 2020, the startup has raised $58 million in Series B financing.Expected at FDA issues guidelines Last year, drug developers were instructed to include people of different demographics in trials. The agency used Covid-19’s health disparities as an example to illustrate why this is so important.
He said: “Combined with society’s understanding of everything that happened last year, this macro wave is changing in the industry.” “Everyone asked us about (experimental diversity), and no one asked about it two years ago. Our question.”
