A company that markets cloud computing systems for the biopharma industry has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round.
Boston-based Reify Health said Wednesday that it had closed the round, led by Battery Ventures, with participation from Sierra Ventures and Asset Management Ventures. The company’s software, StudyTeam, is designed to upgrade the computer systems that healthcare staff at clinical trial sites use to run studies, thereby helping to accelerate enrollment and reduce workloads, it said. The company said it plans to use the money to continue expanding the system.
“The life science industry spends over $4 billion every year on technologies aimed at making clinical trials more efficient,” Reify Health CEO Ralph Passarella said in a statement. “Yet, very little of that investment goes towards technology that helps the frontline healthcare staff who enroll and care for patients. If we want to make clinical trials faster, cheaper and more predictable, the industry can’t keep building technology that increases efficiency for some but decreases efficiency for those working directly with patients.”
In one example of the kind of redundant work that the company seeks to reduce, staff at research sites must often spend several hours manually copying information about patient recruitment and enrollment from their own systems into the logs of clinical trial sponsors so that the sponsors – such as drug companies – will have the information they need to ensure enrollment is as efficient as possible. StudyTeam, Reify said, reduces the amount of time needed to perform that task to a few minutes. The company claims that its software can accelerate enrollment by six weeks on average and is used by 1,800 sites in 26 countries, as well as several large drugmakers.
Indeed, clinical trial investigators have often complained about how shoddy technology, poor communication and busywork add to the amount of time they need to conduct clinical trials.
“The Covid pandemic has shed light at a global scale how much clinical trial speed matters,” Reify Executive Chairman Michael Lin said in a statement. “While the world sits and waits for Covid-19 vaccines and treatments, we should also remember that patients suffering from numerous conditions such as Alzheimer’s and late-stage breast cancer have been waiting on clinical trials for years.”
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.
Photo: Feodora Chiosea, Getty Images
