In response to emailed questions, Castor CEO Derk Arts talks about how he came to form the clinical trial tech startup to improve the drug development process.
Why did you start this company?
Having experience as a medical doctor and a Ph.D. in medical informatics, I was
exposed to the world of clinical trials and evidence-based medicine. I saw first-hand, the issues that researchers face in clinical research. As I was finishing my medical training I saw academic researchers struggling with clinical trials and data capture. I built our first version of Castor as a self-service data capture platform that I used for my own research, and after making it available to colleagues, it became clear there was a huge need for this solution. In 2016, I became full-time CEO and decided to scale and rebuild the platform to help bring evidence-based medicine and research to the masses. At Castor, we call this “democratizing clinical research.”
How did you meet your co-founder?
I met our first engineer, Sebastian, and my other co-founder at the gym, where we
realized we were doing a PhD in the same department. He was finishing his degree while I was starting mine, so he had more time to spend on coding than I did. I brought him in and never looked back. I met Rob (our COO) through my wife. I would always tell him about Castor at get togethers and he would be one of the few people I would speak with that gave me constructive and challenging feedback. I knew I needed someone like that around, and his BCG consulting experience made him the ideal fit to be our COO. On his wedding night, at approximately 12:30 am, I proposed that he join Castor. And
that’s what happened!
Derk Arts
What need/problem are you seeking to address in healthcare?
Right now, getting access to clinical trial software systems is challenging, whether from a price perspective or learning and implementation process. It is a high barrier to entry for many researchers. In most cases, you need to spend 3 months learning a software or outsource to a professional services team to build a clinical trial database – costing millions of dollars to do so. By reducing the barrier to implement and deliver clinical trials in a scalable and self-service way, we believe tens of thousands of more trials can be conducted. At Castor, our mission is to democratize clinical research and increase access to invaluable research data.
What does your technology do?
At our core, Castor has a user-friendly, self-service platform that enables researchers worldwide to build and run their clinical trials. We offer many different components that help digitize and automate the clinical trial process from the old-school paper-and legacy digital solutions, such as through an online screening and enrollment process and capturing and managing high quality data while tracking study endpoints. We believe in a self-service, scalable approach that allows any study sponsor or researcher to quickly deploy digital trials.
Do you have any clinical validation of your product?
We have had over 7,500 studies across the globe built and deployed on Castor’s
platform. A recent highlight we like to point to is our work with the World Health
Organization on their Solidarity Trial, which is the world’s largest adaptive Covid-19 clinical trial ever conducted. Castor provided database support, adaptive randomization, and customized offline data capture. It is one of the largest international randomized trials for Covid-19 treatments: it has enrolled over 13,000 patients in 500 hospital sites in over 30 countries. Additionally, Castor is used by top 5 pharmaceutical companies and has gone through all the steps needed to become an approved vendor.
Photo: Warchi, Getty Images
