Conducting a clinical trial is an arduous task! It involves hundreds and thousands of doctors, patients, researchers, and a substantial amount of data.
The data generated in the trial is critical for ensuring the health and life of a patient, however, manual management might result in blunders leading to serious misinterpretation of data and negligence.
Realising this, the healthcare industry, as a whole, is moving towards technological cloud-based clinical trial software solutions for faster and more efficient clinical trials.
Right now various companies are ruling the CTMS (Clinical Trial Management Software) market, and one such firm is Amsterdam-based Castor. Castor is on a mission to make every clinical trial faster and patient-focused.
Raised €38M
Recently, the Dutch startup raised $45M (approx €38M) in funding in a Series B financing round led by Eight Roads Ventures and F-Prime Capital with participation from existing investors Two Sigma Ventures and Inkef Capital. This round brings the total funding to $65M (approx €55M).
“Castor was created with the mission to help researchers globally conduct more effective clinical trials while improving the patient experience,” says Derk Arts in the press release “Prioritising the patient and site user experience is particularly important today when COVID-19 has fundamentally changed the nature of clinical trials.”
Based out of London, Eight Roads Ventures is a venture capital fund that backs game-changing technology and healthcare companies. The company has offices in China, India, Japan, and the UK. On the other hand, F-Prime Capital is a venture capital firm based out of Cambridge. The VC company invests in healthcare and technology.
Fund utilisation
Castor will use the funding to accelerate product development with a particular focus on scaling direct-to-patient trials globally. The company is planning to expand its operations, particularly in the US and APAC regions.
In an exclusive conversation with Silicon Canals, Derk Arts, M.D., CEO & Founder, Castor, says, “It definitely was not a question of if but rather when, though we have a deep understanding of the EU market it only makes up about 30 per cent of the clinical research market so we are all in on the US and eventually APAC. This series B round will fund product development, expansion into the Asia-Pacific region, hiring and doubling down on Castor’s U.S. footprint. Because without the US you’ll never win.”
On being asked what chunk of this funding round will be assigned to Amsterdam, Art says, “We’re a global remote-first company with over 150 Castorians in 20 countries. The core of our development team will continue to be grown from Amsterdam (ie the EMEA timezone). We expect about two-thirds of the funding to be spent on this side of the ocean.”
He adds, “Our Amsterdam team is 70 people strong – with another 80 remotely across the globe. As a remote-first company – we’re building and hiring for the best talent regardless of where they are located.”
How does Castor’s solution work?
Founded in 2012 by Derk Arts, Castor offers a cloud-based clinical data platform that simplifies and streamlines clinical trials processes.
The company offers a self-service clinical research platform enabling the researcher to design studies and integrate data from any source in real-time.
Interested patients can enroll themselves in trials and share their data online or via a mobile app.
Supported over 7,500 studies
The company has supported over 7,500 studies in more than 90 countries. Castor’s academic studies cover a broad range of disease areas including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, central nervous system (CNS), rare diseases, infectious diseases, and oncology.
In the past year, the company has worked with WHO and landed contracts with over 20 top-tier digital therapeutics companies, and signed its first top 5 pharmaceutical company.
Partnership with Lightship
Last month, Castor announced a partnership with Lightship to run direct-to-patient (hybrid) clinical trials at scale.
Both the companies will work in close collaboration on clinical studies, providing a seamless experience for physicians, nurses, and study coordinators.
Founded in 2018, Lightship is a provider of enterprise-level, direct-to-patient clinical research solutions for decentralised clinical trials.
For both Castor and Lightship, the patient experience comes before anything else. Together we’re improving access to clinical trials for a more diverse range of patients globally, and enhancing the process for patients and clinicians,” says Sam Eells, Co-Founder at Lightship. “This partnership further strengthens Lightship’s end-to-end service by helping to manage studies even more efficiently, with easy-to-use digital health technologies.”
