What You Should Know:
– Reify Health, a leading provider of solutions that empower the clinical trial ecosystem, announced a $220M Series D funding round dedicated to improving diversity in clinical research. The investment comes less than a year after its Series C and brings the company’s valuation to $4.8B.
– The Series C found was co-led by Altimeter Capital and Coatue, joined by Dragoneer Investment Group and existing investors ICONIQ Growth, Adams Street, and Battery Ventures.
Supporting Clinical Trial Diversity
The life sciences industry has long recognized that certain minority communities have been heavily under-represented in clinical trials. To address these disparities, Reify Health has aggressive goals for the next decade aimed at overcoming key barriers inhibiting representative enrollment. This funding round will specifically support long-term investments and initiatives to build a more equitable clinical trial ecosystem.
Reify Health powers a more effective research ecosystem—one that is faster, more reliable, more cost efficient, and most importantly, more accessible to patients. Through its business entities, StudyTeam and Care Access, the company delivers best-in-class trial optimization technology and provides a pioneering decentralized clinical trial infrastructure that makes clinical research accessible for anyone, anywhere. With this new funding, Reify Health will aim these proven solutions at a challenge that has plagued the clinical trial industry for decades: improving diversity in clinical trial participation.
Bringing Representation Inclusion, and Diversity to Global Enrollment (BRIDGE)
Certain minority communities have been heavily underrepresented in clinical trials, which presents a significant health equity issue. Treatments can work differently for different races and ethnicities. Those differences should be understood in the controlled setting of a clinical trial first, not in day-to-day healthcare after the medicine is made available to the public. Over the last several years, key stakeholders that include the FDA, biopharmaceutical companies, medical research institutions, and non-profit organizations have initiated efforts to increase diversity in clinical trial participation. However, meaningful progress has been slow to come.
To combat that issue, Reify Health is launching BRIDGE (Bringing Representation, Inclusion, and Diversity to Global Enrollment), an initiative aimed at devoting the company’s capabilities in partnership with like-minded organizations to achieve two primary objectives:
– Build a robust understanding, both qualitative and quantitative, of the barriers to underrepresented minority groups participating in clinical trials.
– Deliver solutions that overcome these barriers, so clinical trials are more representative of the patient populations they aim to treat.
– Through BRIDGE, Reify and its partners will make commitments to achieve specific goals over the next ten years.
“As we looked at what needs to be done to bring representation and inclusion to clinical trials, we reached two conclusions,” said Ralph Passarella, CEO of Reify Health. “First, while we all want a quick solution, this is a complex, multi-layered problem that will require significant resource commitments over the next decade to achieve meaningful, long-lasting improvements. Second, we recognized that we are uniquely positioned to do work that can make an impact on this problem through our two businesses, Care Access and StudyTeam. We see what needs to be done and have a way to contribute, so we have the responsibility to act.”
