Announcing Our Latest Digital Health Investment
By Adam Goulburn
Today we’re excited to announce our latest digital health investment in Science 37, a technology platform for virtualized clinical trials.
At Lux we’ve long held a thesis around ‘distributed healthcare’. No longer are the four walls of a hospital or doctor’s office the sole owners for where care is delivered. Just like in other industries, patients and consumers of healthcare are demanding convenience. Retail clinics, urgent care centers, on-site clinics and house-calls are all emerging as options for where to get care, and mobile technology is the magical wand that is weaving it all together. We’re big believers, so we’ve put our money where our mouth is. We’ve partnered with and invested in both NY-based companies Pager and Hometeam which are leading the way in this paradigm shift. Science 37, which is our third investment in this theme, is pioneering the world of on-demand clinical trials with the bold mission of helping reduce the time it takes for life saving drugs to get to market.
Given the large number of diseases that humans suffer, it’s always surprising to hear that in the history of the FDA’s existence, only ~1500 drugs have been approved for treatment. For the past 20 years, the Agency has only approved ~30 new drugs per year. Yet with new technologies such as genomic sequencing, our understanding of diseases has improved and our classification has become more refined. We are trending towards a world of personalized medicine by concept but not by reality. In our view, a large reason for this chasm is an outdated infrastructure for clinical trials. It costs $2.6B for a drug to come to market. What’s amazing is that almost 50% of this cost ($1.2B) is the forgone returns during the ~10 years on average a drug candidate spends in development. 10 years is a long time, and most of these development years are spent in clinical trials. Ask any leader (and we’re fortunate to have former Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler on our Lux team) who has been in charge of a drug development pipeline and they will tell you that they would gladly pay millions of dollars more to improve the efficiency of clinical trials and get a drug to market quicker. Motives may be more capitalistic than altruistic, but the end result is getting life saving drugs to those that need it sooner.
Enter Science 37, a company that’s using mobile technology as an air traffic controller to connect all the stakeholders of clinical trials — patients, physicians, investigators, pharma and CROs — with the end result of improving the overall efficiency. The idea is not to replace the clinical trial, but rather to aid, assist and enhance the process while improving patients’ access to potentially lifesaving medicines. Every step of the clinical trial can and will be infused with technology, from patient recruitment, consent and onboarding to delivery of care/drug to follow-up monitoring and data collection. Layer on top a better system for patient-physician communication and an intelligent workflow management tool that can generate real-time reporting, and you now have the recipe for a far more scalable, efficient and seamless trial process.
We know that the concept of virtual clinical trials is not new. We’re also not foolish enough to think that this will be easy. What we do know is that we looked deeply into this space and we kept coming back to Science 37. Noah and his team are lights-out. They’re a new breed of MD hackers. The speed and efficiency at which the S37 team have been executing with their current clinical trials is impressive. They are a small team that’s going to get bigger and better, and this can only mean good things for those in need. Their mission is to get drugs to patients quicker, and Lux is going to do everything in our power to help them succeed.
