The Covid-19 pandemic is altering behavior and fueling demand for remote technologies in clinical trials with Medable, a company in the clinical trial software space, looking to capitalize.
Clinical-trial software company Medable Inc. has raised $91 million from investors as it seeks to build on its growth over the last few months.
The company provides technology to conduct trials remotely, a practice that has boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“There was a big shift in the industry that really opened the door for our technology to play a critical role in how clinical trials are conducted,” Dr. Michelle Longmire, Medable’s co-founder and CEO, said in a phone interview.
Clinical-trial doctors have long been used to seeing patients in their offices, Longmire said. But the pandemic forced many to work from home and meet patients virtually, accelerating adoption of remote tools like Medable’s. There is now a growing argument for decentralized trials.
“It’s gone from an edge case to a main case,” Longmire said. She declined to disclose Medable’s revenue but said it has grown more than 500% this year.
The Palo Alto, California-basedcompany has raised more than $136 million overall. The most recent round, a Series C, was led by Sapphire Ventures. Existing investors also took part. They include GSR Ventures, Streamlined Ventures and North Carolina-based PPD Inc., a clinical research organization that first invested in Medable in 2018.
“Our continuing strategic investments in Medable and our strong partnership enhance PPD’s leading capabilities in digital trial conduct across the globe,” said Anna Long, senior vice president for enterprise strategy and innovation at PPD, in a statement. “We are working with Medable to deliver disruptive solutions, such as a new and innovative approach that addresses inefficiencies in electronic clinical outcome assessments, or eCOA, and bring a fundamentally different solution to meet the evolving requirements of each customer’s research program.”
The investment will fuel improvements in several areas for Medable, which employs about 180 people, Longmire said. The company aims to improve access to clinical trials, speed them up, raise the standard of care and capture more data.
“Our goal is to make clinical trials a consumer experience that fits seamlessly into people’s lives,” said Longmire, a dermatologist and rare-disease researcher who founded Medable in 2015. “Clinical trials have really been limited in terms of the access to patients who could benefit.”
The company’s platform has been used worldwide for registrational clinical trials in a variety of therapeutic areas, including vaccines for Covid-19. Longmore declined to identify which vaccines. “It’s just been really exciting to play a key role in something that’s been so important,” she said.
Medable also is focused on increasing diversity in clinical trials, a priority across the health care sector, Longmire said.
As it beefs up its platform, Medable has forged partnerships with companies specializing in data collection, telemedicine and remote patient monitoring.
In April, for example, the company began working with AliveCor, a company that makes an electrocardiogram reader, or ECG, called KardiaMobile6L. ECG readings are often standard practice for monitoring safety in clinical trials but they usually take place in an office. AliveCor’s device is cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for home use.
PPD and Medable, meanwhile, worked together this year to launch an app called TeleVisit, which connects patients virtually with site coordinators, investigators and other care professionals.
“Michelle and her team have demonstrated how a patient-focused solution can catalyze true innovation in clinical trials,” Dr. Sunny Kumar, a partner at GSR Ventures, said in a statement. “We have full confidence that Medable’s digital and decentralized trial platform will define the next frontier of medication development.”
