BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Reify Health today announced a $220 million Series C funding round led by Coatue Management, joined by ICONIQ Growth and Adams Street Partners, as well as existing investors Sierra Ventures and Battery Ventures. This latest funding, which brings the company’s valuation to $2.2 billion, underscores Reify Health’s success in dramatically shortening clinical trial timelines.
Reify Health has built a new foundation for how clinical trials are run through its business entities, StudyTeam and Care Access. StudyTeam delivers the best-in-class technology platform for optimizing patient recruitment and enrollment, and is used by top-20 global biopharma companies such as Amgen, AstraZeneca, and Eli Lilly and Company, and approximately 4,000 research sites across 65 countries. Care Access, having conducted the most advanced decentralized trials at scale, is the world’s leading decentralized research organization that brings clinical trial infrastructure directly to patients, healthcare providers, and communities.
Getting new medicines into the hands of patients depends on clinical trials. However, biopharma companies are only able to activate a few dozen research sites worldwide, on average, for each trial due to logistical complexities. Each research site does its best to engage patients nearby, but most patients are simply not close enough to access the clinical trial. This creates a natural bottleneck in getting clinical trials enrolled and completed.
The result of this operational bottleneck is a “Sit and Wait” paradox that has persisted in the industry for decades. There are more than enough patients to complete the vast majority of clinical trials, but biopharma companies and research sites have been forced to sit and wait for patients to come to one of the few locations where the trial can take place. Each trial takes months or years longer to enroll than necessary. Patients suffering from debilitating conditions like Alzheimer’s and late-stage breast cancer wait for years on slow clinical trials for potential cures.
“What we’re doing, and the future of clinical trials overall, goes beyond decentralized trials,” said Michael Lin, Executive Chairman of Reify Health. “We need to have a global healthcare system proactively reaching out to patients everywhere and mobilizing the resources necessary to bring trials to them.”
“Early on, we spent a number of years trying to understand this question: why is clinical research still such a devastating bottleneck on drug development?” said Ralph Passarella, CEO of Reify Health. “It was painfully obvious that slow, unpredictable patient enrollment was at the heart of the problem. If we want to consistently enroll trials in three to four months instead of 18 months, there are two key things we must achieve. 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. We built the StudyTeam platform in 2015 to tackle the first part of that future state.”
Leading biopharma companies and research sites use StudyTeam to optimize enrollment across their clinical trial portfolios. StudyTeam helps biopharma companies see how they can enroll trials faster using common strategies. It also helps them see where in their portfolio they need to try something new — where the “Sit and Wait'' enrollment approach just isn’t working. Those trials are opportunities to go beyond optimizing enrollment and start bringing a trial to any patient anywhere by partnering with Care Access.
“We knew that if we wanted to truly transform how trials are run, we had to go beyond identifying the right patients and enrollment strategies,” said Ahmad Namvargolian, CEO of Care Access. “We also had to build the capabilities necessary to allow any patient anywhere to actually participate in a trial. Starting in 2015, we began bringing research to new patient populations by building more than 60 new research sites. After years of assembling new research sites, we developed an innovative, proprietary model with our Mobile Site Vehicles that can bring a trial anywhere in the U.S., and more countries coming soon. We’ve now operated massive and complex trials in ways that, just five years ago, would have felt like science fiction. The future of clinical trials is here.”
Reify Health will use the additional funding to fuel rapid growth and expansion of both business entities. Care Access will accelerate global operations and foster deep partnerships with clinics and other healthcare organizations. The StudyTeam platform will continue to scale and expand its functionality that enables the numerous stakeholders in decentralized trials to execute the complex logistics required to bring trials to patients anywhere.
“We seek out innovative companies at the intersection of technology and healthcare and were impressed by Reify Health’s strong collaboration with key stakeholders in the ecosystem. We believe Reify Health will help transform clinical trials, starting with the critical pain point of patient recruitment and reinventing trial operations around it,” said Aaron Weiner, Managing Director and Head of Healthcare at Coatue Management. “Coatue is proud to partner with Reify and support it on its path to help shape clinical research and to provide all patients the ability to access clinical trials.”
About Reify Health
Reify Health paves the way to faster, predictable, and more accessible clinical trials. Through its business entities, StudyTeam and Care Access, the company provides best-in-class clinical optimization software, with a focus on effective enrollment, and transformative clinical trial infrastructure that delivers research directly to more healthcare providers, communities, and patients wherever they are. Through partnerships with top biopharma companies, leading healthcare organizations, and thousands of research sites worldwide, Reify Health eliminates delays in drug development one trial at a time. To find out how Reify Health makes clinical research better, faster, and more collaborative, visit www.reifyhealth.com.
