Reify Health, a Boston startup that’s been working for nearly a decade to digitize the clinical trial process, just got a massive vote of confidence from some prominent investors. Totaling $220 million, the Series C was led by Coatue Management, with participation from ICONIQ Growth and Adams Street Partners, and values the company at $2.2 billion.
The clinical trial process is a notoriously inefficient one. Biopharmaceutical companies are often only able to operate in a few dozen research sites worldwide, which leads to a limited pool of subjects who can participate. Consequently, these companies are left with what Reify Health describes as a “sit and wait” situation — where they have to sit and wait for patients to come to one of the few locations a clinical trial is taking place.
This reality can tack months or even years onto the clinical trial process, which means patients suffering from potentially debilitating conditions are waiting longer than necessary for medications to be approved and developed. This is the problem Reify is working to solve.
“If we want to consistently enroll trials in three or four months instead of 18 months, there are two key things we must achieve,” Reify Health CEO Ralph Passarella explained in a statement. “First, we must be able to rapidly identify enough interested patients. Second, we have to make it feasible for those patients to participate in the relevant trial.”
To address the first concern, Reify Health created StudyTeam, a platform that allows biopharma companies and research sites to recruit and enroll participants more efficiently. Users can then pair this software with Reify Health’s second solution, Care Access, a decentralized research organization that helps bring clinical trial infrastructure to participants remotely.
“After years of assembling new research sites, we developed an innovative proprietary platform model with our Mobile Site Vehicles that can bring a trial anywhere in the U.S., and more countries coming soon,” Care Access CEO Ahmad Namvargolian said in a statement. “We’ve now operated massive complex trials in ways that, just five years ago, would have felt like science fiction. The future of clinical trials is here.”
Of course, clinical trials — especially remote-friendly ones — have taken on new importance amid the pandemic, so Reify Health’s technology has been experiencing a recent surge in demand among pharmaceutical companies. The company counts industry leaders like AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly among StudyTeam’s 4,000 users worldwide, and claims Care Access has conducted the most advanced “decentralized trials” at scale. And the company has big plans ahead.
“What we’re doing, and the future of clinical trials overall, goes beyond decentralized trials,” Michael Lin, Reify Health’s executive chairman, said in a statement. “We need to have a global healthcare system proactively reaching out to patients everywhere and mobilizing the resources necessary to bring trials to them.”
To do this, Reify Health will use this fresh funding to scale both StudyTeam and Care Access to meet this heightened demand. The company also plans to considerably grow its headcount in Boston and throughout the United States, and has dozens of open tech positions listed on its website.
