Clinical trials recruiting company Curelauncher is ramping up its sales and marketing team to work with more of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies.
The Michigan-based startup says it already has two of the Big 5 as customers. By year’s end, it wants to double that number – and is looking at the likes of Novartis, Merck, Sanofi, Pfizer and Eli Lilly.
To achieve that, Curelauncher is raising $500,000.
“We’re essentially the Match.com for clinical trials,” said Mark Bennett, the company’s chief strategy officer and general counsel.
Curelauncher addresses one of the pharma industry’s biggest and most documented challenges: Successfully recruiting patients into clinical trials.
Curelauncher charges pharmaceutical companies to help recruit patients into clinical trials. By keeping the process free and easy for patients, caregivers and health practitioners, the company hopes to help hasten enrollment in the thousands of clinical trials underway around the country.
The most robust option for patients who want to enter clinical trials is the government’s website portal, ClinicalTrials.gov. But it’s a confusing and jargon-filled site, Bennett said. A number of clinical trial matchmaking services already exist (find a list of many of them here). Bennett said Curelauncher differentiates itself by focusing on over-the-phone interactions with “relationship managers” as opposed to developing a website option for patients.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“Most of our competitors are electronic, so there’s no human assist – human intervention for most of these matchmaking services is the last mile,” Bennett said. “We’re different because of that human element – and we’re finding that patients and their families seem to prefer talking to an actual person about their clinical trial options.”
Curelauncher has raised about $1.25 million in seed funding since its 2012 launch, including the seed fund IncWell, and is also operating off of revenue from its pharmaceutical customers. Though in the midst of a small financing round, the company relies primarily on the revenue it generates, Bennett said.
He said he expects to try for another round of financing by mid-2015.
“There’s an organizational demand for patients right now — drug companies want more, faster. It’s a major problem in the industry,” Bennett said. “We’re filling a pretty important niche here.”
[Photo from Flickr user Pete]
