Lindus Health has set out to make the process of running the clinical trials faster and easier with the help of $18M round of funding using its CRO “next-gen contract research organization” and have been backed by big-name investors including Spotify investor Creandum. Beckwith, founder of Lindus Health, said, “I was just completely shocked to see how unbelievably dysfunctional that was. And this was one of the really big, well-funded phase-three trials. I remember having to download Internet Explorer to even sign up for the clinical trial. The website the CRO had built was on WordPress and didn’t have an SSL certificate. And on the clinical trial side, there were just tons of ridiculous errors. So that was a real eye-opener.”
He also added, “I worked for a bit in venture capital, and I came across companies running their own clinical trials. Everyone was universally frustrated with the outcomes. Everyone just constantly complained about how long clinical trials took, how the outcomes were always bad, and there were always mistakes. So as an investor, I thought this is a really interesting area for investment.”
Michael Young, one of the founders of Lindus Health stated, “We just weren’t thinking about that at all,” and “it was that experience that made me start digging into what is actually happening with clinical trials. We came to the conclusion that THAT is the bottleneck that’s stopping all the really cool R&D stuff that’s happening from getting to patients.” “The companies we compete with are the big CROs,” Young said. “This is a massive market, and tech-first CROs have not yet got a foothold.” “It’s a cliche that sites (where clinical studies take place) hate the software on the market,”
Young said. “We’ve invested thousands of hours speaking to site users to ensure our tool is intuitive and automates the basic tasks that they do. This results in more engaged sites and therefore faster recruitment and better data.” “The result is that, despite the best intentions, there can be contradictions or even seemingly sensible additions which hamstring a trial,” and added, “For example, adding so many exclusion criteria that a trial is almost impossible to recruit for.”