Boston startup iSpecimen‘s primary dealings are with excreta – the company supplies, on-demand, human biospecimens like blood, urine and feces to researchers.
iSpecimen uses de-identified medical records to seek out specific patient characteristics that a researcher is looking for. It then instructs its healthcare partners to pick and ship specimens like blood, urine and cerebrospinal fluid to the customer.
ISpecimen just raised $8 million in a Series B round; the Lexington, Massachusetts company previously held a $2 million Series A in 2012. New investor OneBlood, a nonprofit community blood center based in Florida, participated in the round, investing under a wholly owned subsidiary. This particular relationship will help iSpecimen scale, the company said, to meet an increasing demand of researchers that need annotated human biospecimens.
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.
The company was founded in 2009, and stands out for its use of mining electronic health records and lab information systems to find specific patients and their biospecimens to repurpose them into research, it said.
