Decentralized medical trial firm Curebase raised $40 million in a Sequence B spherical led by Trade Ventures.
Acrew Capital, World Innovation Lab, Constructive Sum, Gaingels, GGV Capital, Daring Capital and Xfund participated within the funding, which additionally included a strategic funding from pharma big Gilead Sciences. The spherical brings Curebase’s complete increase to $59 million.
WHAT IT DOES
Curebase gives software program and operations help for managing decentralized medical trials. That features an app for sufferers to allow them to discover and enroll in trials, signal consent types, entry telemedicine and schedule residence visits. The corporate additionally gives a site-facing platform to help with recruitment, prescreening potential individuals and managing their medical trials.
Exterior of software program, Curebase staffers like principal investigators, analysis coordinators and venture managers can assist execute medical trials by discovering potential websites, coaching and organising software program, and recruiting and retaining sufferers.
“Your conventional medical trial takes place at a giant hospital, it is restricted to on-site participation. And that may result in gradual recruitment of sufferers, lack of range and a much less satisfying affected person expertise, which in the end brings medication and gadgets to market extra slowly,” Curebase founder and CEO Tom Lemberg instructed MobiHealthNews.
“So we take the trial to the affected person. And our imaginative and prescient is actually to allow any affected person to be in a medical trial, wherever they stay, at residence and with their very own physician in their very own neighborhood.”
WHAT IT’S FOR
The startup plans to make use of the capital to put money into its platform, together with by rising their design group to enhance the person expertise for sufferers. Curebase may even rent medical providers staff and increase its attain in Europe.
“We’re additionally positioning for extra complicated sorts of trials. And we’re actually investing closely in a number of the issues that our pharma and biotech prospects are in search of,” Lemberg mentioned.
“So we’re actually investing in our digital knowledge seize programs, direct knowledge seize programs, distant monitoring, distant risk-based monitoring, [and] knowledge administration, in order that we will transcend simply that digital expertise and do enterprise-grade knowledge administration for these extra complicated pharmaceutical and biotech research.”
MARKET SNAPSHOT
The marketplace for decentralized medical trial know-how grew in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, as telehealth and digital care expanded. Different firms within the area embody THREAD, which earlier this month introduced it had acquired trial recruitment platform CureClick; Reify Well being, which lately raised $220 million in Sequence D funding; and Medable, which landed greater than $300 million in October final 12 months.
“I feel that earlier than COVID there was already a purpose to do what we needed to do. The concept medical trials must be extra patient-centric, they need to attain sufferers at residence of their communities, they need to be quicker, they need to be extra various, and that must be finished by way of know-how. I feel that is existed for a very long time,” Lemberg mentioned.
“However in fact, there’s threat aversion, and it makes it exhausting to implement these issues. I feel COVID actually modified that by making it value taking that probability.”
