Decentralized clinical trial specialist Curebase said today that it has secured $40 million in Series B funding.
The lead investor in the round was Industry Ventures. Other investors contributing to the round include Acrew Capital, World Innovation Lab, Positive Sum, Gilead Sciences (Nasdaq:GILD) and existing investors GGV Capital, Bold Capital and Xfund.
The San Francisco–based company has worked to popularize the concept of “bring your own physician” (BYOP) to make clinical trials available to patients regardless of location.
“Traditional clinical trials at big hospitals tend to be slower, more expensive, less diverse,” Curebase CEO Tom Lemberg said in an interview. “Our objective as a company is to bring the trial to the patient both at home and with their own physician.”
Tom Lemberg
Curebase says its decentralized approach can accelerate recruiting, facilitate clinical trial diversity and ultimately improve clinical research.
The company has surpassed industry averages on diversity by a wide margin while also driving faster recruitment, Lemberg said. “We do over 200 patients per month and recruitment into the majority of our studies,” he noted.
Lemberg says its approach also optimizes patient experience. For example, the company recently was involved in a pivotal gastrointestinal study supporting FDA authorization with 97% patient satisfaction.
The company plans on using the funding to expand its development of sophisticated site and community healthcare interfaces, clinical software and services and add new capabilities for interventional drug sponsors and global studies. Lemberg plans to continue optimizing the patient experience.
“We want to make the experience for patients incredibly simple — consumer-grade and as easy as anything else you do on your smartphone,” he said.
“The second thing is we are not just virtual, and we are investing even more with the Series B in our site operating system,” Lemberg continued. “We think there is a really strong role for the community physician.”
Curebase has more than 100 community sites that use its platform or site operating system. Its platform allows sites to “participate in a very low burden way,” Lemberg said. “For example, we can work with urgent cares, primary cares, OB-GYNs and local specialists.”
In addition, the company will use the funding to expand its virtual site services. It currently has virtual principal investigators and virtual research coordinators. “We can operate in a very end-to-end way. We can take a trial from start to finish,” Lemberg said
Curebase was founded in 2018. The company has raised $59 million to date.
Filed Under: clinical trials, Drug Discovery
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