Judges picked TrialSpark as the winning pitch for the life sciences track at MedCity INVEST Precision Medicine.
If drug prices are going to fall, it will take more than just slapping new price tags on what comes out of the drug-development pipeline.
It will require reinventing the pipeline itself. Among the companies pursuing that goal is TrialSpark.
The company has built up a technology platform designed to help biotechnology startups reach patients and lower the cost of running clinical trials.
“When a biotech raises, let’s say, $50 million in their early days, they already know that up to 60% of that is going to be earmarked for a clinical trial,” said Joe Zaccaria, client growth director for TrialSpark, which has about 100 employees. “We want to enable those biotechs to run more clinical studies and also run them more efficiently.”
Based in New York, TrialSpark was founded in 2014 by CEO Ben Liu, an Oxford-trained computational biologist, and Chief Technology Officer Linhao Zhang, a veteran of SalesForce and health insurance startup Oscar Health.
In 2018, the company raised a Series B round of $80 million from Thrive Capital and Sequoia Capital, among others, bringing the company’s total funding to $87 million.
TrialSpark focused at first on improving and streamlining patient recruitment and forged partnerships with larger pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Novartis, Zaccaria said. The company went on to identify other bottlenecks and now offers an end-to-end technology solution for managing clinical trials, from finding patients to collecting data.
“TrialSpark is meeting an ongoing need in the marketplace for smart patient recruitment and data extraction from clinical studies,” said Wayne Barz, a judge in the INVEST Pitch Perfect competition and chief investment officer of Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania, a state-backed venture fund based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Users of the TrialSpark platform include the former resTORbio, which began this summer to investigate a therapy called RTB-101 for treating people with Covid-19 outside of hospitals. In September, resTORbio was acquired by California-based Adicet Bio.
TrialSpark also is partnering with Aditum Bio, a biotech investment firm founded by Joe Jimenez, former CEO of Novartis, and Mark Fishman, former president of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research. The Oakland-based firm is looking to repurpose therapies that have been de-prioritized by larger pharma firms.
“The scientific and technical aspects of bringing new treatments to market still has yet to significantly benefit from the digital revolution. But TrialSpark is already demonstrating how to reimagine clinical trials and bringing benefits to patients,” said Rena Rosenberg, an INVEST Pitch Perfect judge and a member of Philadelphia-based investment firm Robin Hood Ventures.
While TrialSpark is focused on helping others in the clinical trial process, its long-range plans include bringing its own therapies to market, Zaccaria said. That would be completing something of a full circle for the company.
Liu helped co-found TrialSpark after he was turned down by large pharmaceutical companies when he brought them potential drug candidates for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, Zaccaria said.
“Ben and Linhao and our investors really want to see TrialSpark be an integrated pharmaceutical drug company, bringing drugs to market,” Zaccaria said. “It’s a long-term vision but we really think the core to that is having a better drug-development process.”
