Research Grid, an AI startup that helps medical research institutions automate back-office admin for clinical trials, has raised a £5 million seed round of funding.
The company says it will use the new funding to double down on its mission of making clinical trials faster and more successful.
The round was led by Fuel Ventures, with participation from Arve Capital, Ada Ventures, Morgan Stanley Inclusive Ventures Lab, Arāya Ventures, Ascension Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, and Atomico Angels, with limited availability remaining.
The clinical trials market is now seen as the major bottleneck in the drug development process. This is often caused when using legacy software systems and manual processes to manage trials, resulting in inefficiency, errors and weak patient engagement. Delays to clinical trials are also expensive.
To solve this problem, Research Grid has developed two products, Inclusive and TrialEngine, which it says together allow its customers to seamlessly manage the full life cycle of clinical trials in one place.
The company will use the funding to invest in R&D, developing more AI automations and building out its engineering teams. It also plans to grow its marketing and sales functions as it expands its presence in US and Asian markets.
The company was founded by Dr Amber Hill, a former medical researcher with a PhD in biomedical neuroscience and a background in AI research technology.
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The recruitment phase is a common source of delays in clinical trials, due to the extremely manual process of sourcing representative samples of patients which are often sourced via adverts on social media. Increased pressure from the FDA to ensure representative patient panels means this has become increasingly important.
Research Grid’s Inclusive product, a patient recruitment and engagement platform, aims to solve this problem by providing instant access to a vetted network of more than 91,000 global communities covering 2,050 medical conditions. It also automates all the admin, such as patient outreach, payments and data management.
The TrialEngine product, which connects seamlessly with Inclusive, handles the administration, data, and reporting workflows during the trial itself. It leverages Research Grid’s AI algorithms to automate tasks such as protocol generation and data extraction.
“I spent 14 years as a medical researcher, and I would spend hundreds of hours copying data from one system to another,” said CEO Dr Hill.
“The back-office process is completely broken. When you multiply this across the industry the costs for patients and research institutions are astronomical. That’s why we’re building the automation engine for admin-free clinical trials.
“Whether you’re a pharmaceutical company, a CRO, or a clinical research site, we can help run faster, more successful clinical trials. We’ve already seen how AI is accelerating drug discovery and it’s time to do the same in clinical trials.
“We’re delighted to have the support of our investors. Now we’re focusing on expanding our engineering teams and scaling up our R&D efforts, allowing us to deliver more of the features our customers are asking for. We’ll also be growing our sales and marketing team so that we can take advantage of opportunities in the US and Asia.”
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