A digital healthcare company that says it has a new way to sign up patients for clinical trials online has raised $11 million in new funding.
Antidote Technologies Ltd has raised the new funding from a group led by Merck Global Health Innovation Fund that includes existing investors Smedvig Capital and Octopus Ventures. The company, which changed its name to Antidote from TrialReach Ltd a year ago, develops and markets a trio of digital products for the clinical trials market.
About 80% of all clinical trials are delayed or closed due to lack of participants, Antidote says. The process for a patient to find the right clinical trial can be hit or miss, the company says. For example, big medical centers may have a website to help inform and recruit patients locally for a certain trial, and nonprofit health organizations also work with community groups to educate patients about clinical trials and help them navigate issues such as getting insurance companies to pay the costs of participation.
But Antidote claims its suite of products—Antidote Match, Connect Network and Antidote Bridge—use a combination of artificial intelligence, web analytics and personalization technology—to find clinical trials for patients tied to specific online healthcare communities. Patients first use the Antidote search engine to find clinical trials based on the treatment or condition they are interested in and then answer a series of personal and demographic questions to find clinical trials near them based on their ZIP codes, how far they are willing to travel, age, sex and some related medical questions.
Antidote says it will use the funding to expand its clinical trials base in the U.S. and for general corporate expansion. To date, the company has incorporated 4,000 clinical trials into its technology and plans to reach full coverage of U.S. trials next year with enhanced capabilities, including matching cancer patients to studies using mutation-level data, Antidote says.
Antidote now works with 180 leading patient communities such as JDRF, Lung Cancer Alliance and Healthline to connect people and healthcare organizations needing patients for a clinical trial. Earlier this year Antidote made its clinical trial-matching platform accessible to the pharmaceutical industry with Match APITM, a website and mobile app that allows an organization to match patients to their portfolio or program of trials. The company also is piloting Antidote Base, a software-as-a-service product that enables research sites to invite local, engaged patients to participate in their studies.
“We think the Antidote approach fits well with our focus on investing in companies that play a critical role in the new digital clinical trial management ecosystem,” says Francesca Wuttke, managing director at drug maker Merck GHI.
Antidote, a London-based company with offices in New York and Carmel, Ind., didn’t break out its customers or pricing but does say it has made 14,000 clinical trials “matchable,” primarily in the U.S.
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