Technology-Driven Pharmaceuticals TrialSpark Secures $ 156 Million Series C Funding

• TrialSpark has announced that it has raised $ 156 million in Series C funding. Those are the details.

TrialSpark announced that it had raised $ 156 million in Series C funding. Sam Altman and Lachy Groom led the funding round with the participation of new and existing investors including Sequoia Capital (responsible for Series A), Thrive Capital ( responsible for Series B), Casdin Capital, Dragoneer, Section 32, John Doerr, Spark Capital, Felicis Ventures, Sound Ventures, Arrowmark and former investors.

TrialSpark is building a next-generation pharmaceutical company focused on delivering new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently. And despite radical technological changes transforming biotechnology, bringing a new drug to market still takes more than 10 years and costs billions of dollars. Development time and costs continue to increase, contributing to rising drug prices, inflation of healthcare costs, and decreased access to treatment for patients.

TrialSpark’s thesis is that in today’s world – where the lengthy and expensive clinical trial process is the biggest bottleneck in drug development – the competitive edge you want as a company pharmaceutical industry is to be able to conduct clinical trials cheaper and faster. And TrialSpark is building a comprehensive pharmaceutical company that can develop drugs in-house faster and more efficiently than traditional pharmaceutical companies, driven by the belief that every day saved in the clinical trial process is a day sooner than a patient can. access a life changing treatment.

The company will use the Series C funds to purchase and / or clinical-stage pharmaceutical assets to be developed through its in-house clinical trials platform, and also to invest in biotech companies with drug candidates. promising ready to be developed. And there are countless excellent drug candidates on the shelves due to the prohibitive cost and length of traditional clinical trials, and TrialSpark is uniquely positioned to give these treatments a shot at reaching patients.

Since its launch in 2016 by CEO Benjamine Liu, a computational biologist trained at Yale and Oxford and CTO Linhao Zhang, a Salesforce and Oscar Health veteran, And TrialSpark has built a clinical trials engine that delivers quality and reliability. study speed improved through real-time access. data, innovative test design and operational agility.

The TrialSpark technology platform integrates the trial front-end (recruiting, eConsent, eSource) with the back-end (data management, monitoring and biostats) to eliminate siled study data. And the result is 50% faster study times and 95% unblocked patients who had not previously been reached by clinical trials.

The Series C funding cycle will also be used to scale the TrialSpark team, which is growing rapidly across New York and remotely. And with a diverse team drawn from technology, life sciences and pharma, TrialSpark merges decades of in-depth subject matter expertise and technological thinking to radically reinvent every part of the pharmaceutical value chain and work to bring treatments for patients faster than ever before. .

KEY QUOTES:

“A lot of people are complaining about the appalling cost of bringing a new drug to market, but TrialSpark is doing something about it. Clinical trials are unnecessarily complex and expensive, which directly contributes to drug costs and prevents many promising drugs from being marketed. TrialSpark can fix this problem.

– Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI

“Trialspark is building a new type of pharmaceutical company that has the potential to dramatically expand patient access to new treatments and align key stakeholders in drug development. We are delighted to be part of this substantial and ambitious journey with them. “

– Kareem Zaki, general partner at Thrive Capital

“When we first met, Benjamine was clear about the journey he wanted to take. Nothing has changed. TrialSpark scaled the foothills and the summit assault began.

– Michael Moritz, partner at Sequoia Capital