When a patient has blood drawn, some of it’s used for testing, sure — but what happens to the rest?
It’s often discarded, though hospitals and clinical labs are now selling these leftovers for research purposes. They tend to go with biobanking, in which huge repositories of patient samples are kept on hand.
Boston startup iSpecimen is building a sort of next-gen version of biobanking: It sources these remaining patient samples, and makes them – and the associated data – available to researchers on demand.
The company doesn’t work like a typical biobank. It isn’t a repository for excreta. Rather, it’s more of a tech company that sources biological samples remotely from a hospital system or a clinical lab, then arranges for it to be sent to the researcher. And because iSpecimen doesn’t have to store its own samples, it can tout access to more than 10 million patient samples.
“There’s a huge demand for specimens, and that demand is being driven by agendas in precision medicine,” CEO Christopher Ianelli said.
After all, many life sciences companies are looking for samples from highly specified patient populations – and it can be challenging to find them in the current biobank system, he said.
“This is a good revenue opportunity for hospitals and labs, too,” Ianelli said, explaining the company’s sales approach. “They can generate high margin revenue off of yesterday’s garbage.”
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.
Another win iSpecimen has over your standard biobank, Ianelli said, is that many have material sitting in them so long that the data the customers want today didn’t exist when the specimen was first collected. iSpecimen is working with a network of some 40 hospitals, connecting with their electronic health records to sync its log of patient biological samples.
The company, a Mass Challenge finalist, closed out a $2 million Series A, and an $8 million Series B last year. Moving forward, it should be able to rely on revenue, Ianelli said.
Ianelli added that the company has built “very robust deidentification technology” that it gives hospitals, so that all data remains HIPAA protected. It’s working with the University of Massachusetts health system, as well as Wisconsin’s Aurora Health Care and several other hospitals.
Ianelli used to work as a pathologist at Brigham and Women’s where he helped build a similar system meant purely for Partners Healthcare. Rather than having lab techs throw away blood samples a few days after testing, the team compiled infomrait
“We based our whole company on that idea,” Ianelli said. “We have no affiliation with Brigham and Women’s, Mass General or Harvard, but in many ways we’ve copied what was done over there, as well as designed and developed our own technology.”
