
Comprehend (YC W11) Raises $8.4M Led by Sequoia to Lower Clinical Trial Costs - jakek
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2013/07/11/comprehend-raises-8-4m-led-by-sequoia-to-lower-costs-of-clinical-trials/
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rmorrison
Rick from Comprehend here, we're also hiring. Definitely reach out if you're
interested in transforming the medical industry!
[http://www.comprehend.com/careers](http://www.comprehend.com/careers)

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emidln
Don't most Life Sciences companies already do this internally? I mean, I only
have anecdotal evidence, but I worked on and released a couple versions of
something for Abbott Labs that sounds eerily similar to what the press release
mentions you doing (actually, went a lot further into budget forecasting
(including updating and alerting for deviations based on incoming data
automatically) and automatic payment calculation and authorization in addition
to collaboration, data input, time keeping, and dashboarding for
analysts/executives.

In any event, good luck to you. From what I've seen from the inside, newer
tech stacks can deal some serious disruption in a very short time frame.

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rmorrison
Most companies do _something_ internally, but it's typically slow, expensive,
out-of-date, breaks frequently, and is prone to errors.

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eliben
Finally, channeling 21st century software technology to something useful. One
of the most important industries in the world - healthcare - is sadly broken
and advances significantly slower than other technological domains. I wish
more investments went that way, for our own good...

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dmix
Healthcare and education are the biggest laggards in technology yet data is
super important to their effectiveness. The regulatory minefield (and
traditionalist culture) within these industries can only hold back modern
technology adoption for so long. Fortunately they seem to be becoming more
open to it these days.

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dsl
> The regulatory minefield

Ha! The FDA review board for a drug is allowed to own and trade pharmaceutical
stocks, receive cash incentives and guarantees of future employment from
companies under review, and generally relies on the summary findings of the
company to make their decisions.

It is as much of a minefield as the FCC is to the Family Research Council, or
congress is to big oil.

~~~
cinquemb
I took it that they were speaking to people trying to get in on the action and
not the incumbents.

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chintan
To really lower clinical trial costs, one of the biggest line item that can
have an impact on the bottom line is patient recruitment. According to
stats[1], 80% of trials are delayed due to patient recruitment issues and
causes several billions of dollars to industry. Furthermore, different
locations, countries have different accural rates and proper planning is
required to select the right sites.

IMO, providing a dashboard of trial stats to pharma is helpful but it would
not really cut down the majority of costs.

1\.
[http://www.ciscrp.org/professional/facts_pat.html](http://www.ciscrp.org/professional/facts_pat.html)

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chrisgd
There are a lot of companies doing this already - Qunitiles, Blue Chip,
Acurian, etc. Anything that can streamline the process is potentially
beneficial

~~~
rmorrison
There are a lot of companies doing this, but it's still a huge problem and I
agree w/ chintan that there is a lot of opportunity for innovation.

~~~
noname123
Hi,

I used to work for a BigPharma designing their in-house clinical trial
tracking software. The problem is not so much the platform, but system
integration. We had a nice system with d3.js charts plotting Pk trials after
results. A scheduling system with nice Ajax calendar component to schedule
daily animal dosing. A in-life component that linked up with RFID scanners to
track patient vitals/conditions. A nice drag-and-drop web GUI for setting up
samples for mass spec analysis. All under a phase-by-phase, wizard step-by-
step platform, from study design all the way to compliance reporting.
Designing the system from the ground up wasn't difficult, system integration
wasn't. We even had gadgetized all of the components so that PIs/lab
associates could customize their daily dashboard.

Research groups are across the globe and use different stat packages. No one
is willing to give up years of work in Excel spreadsheets, Phoenix, STATA
whatever. So have to build tons of import/export tools to accommodate all of
the tools.

Different research groups wanted different things. We had stakeholders, e.g.,
PIs from different research groups come in during all of the design/review
meetings. One team wanted their scheduling calendar on 'MS Project' linear
style layout, another team wanted it to be on the Outlook style. We ended up
building both.

Different research groups had different hardware spec's as well. Throughout
the pipeline, we had a nice tool that set up samples to be analyzed for mass
spec analysis. Integrating with various hardware formats and different
layout's, well-templates with existing in-house assay library database/web-
services took a long time.

tl,dr; BigPharma has tons of proprietary assay, compounds database/web-
service, third-party statistical packages and mass spec hardware spec's that a
external vendor needs to integrate with; good luck.

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wallenberg
I wonder how you deal with security concerns. I think since the result of
clinical trials can have such a large impact on a pharma co's share price,
there have been a number of cases where insiders with access to trial results
have given information to financial trading firms who then proceed to exploit
the information in the market.

how do you assure your customers that the information put in your system won't
leak?

~~~
rmorrison
We actually spend a lot of time thinking and dealing with security concerns,
both from a software development perspective and from a devops perspective.
You're correct that the data is very valuable, so a large percentage of our
architecture and design decisions are dictated by security and privacy
concerns.

This actually becomes even more complicated when you think about maintaining
blinding, aggregate-only blinding, and some of the other features we need to
support.

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netcan
" _“We are very interested in vertical software as a service,” he said.
“There’s about a trillion dollars of enterprise software, if you’re looking at
market capitalization out there today. Some of that will transition to
[specialized] enterprise software…and create multi-billion dollar companies.”_
"

Interesting point. Two points converging really. Enterprise SAAS & Vertical
SAAS. There is still lots of room here. Customers willing to pay. Anyone
that's trying to come up with "synthetic" startup ideas might start here. More
difficult to comprehend verticals are probably least served.

Basecamp for X, where X is some business type that not many people understand.

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codex
Isn't most of the cost in clinical trials in manufacturing the drugs, finding
and paying investigators, paying for legal services, recruitment of patients,
getting informed consent, etc? Does Comprehend help with that stuff?

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nutjob123
I am surprised that Medidata solutions( mdsol.com ) hasn't been brought up.
They do something very similar with very forward looking products/apps that
are already being adopted by big pharma.

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rmorrison
Medidata is a data collection system, and Comprehend works out of the box with
them. If you're one of their customers you can start looking at your data in
Comprehend simply by providing us with your API credentials.

The problem is, many companies use Medidata, Oracle, MERGE, and other vendors.
Inside of a single study, let alone across several. That's where Comprehend
comes in. We simply help customers get the actionable insights they need, and
then help them take those actions.

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sadkingbilly
Is this just another CTMS? Similar to OpenClinica etc?

~~~
rmorrison
No, we actually work on top of CTMS or EDC systems. Basically, there are just
so many of these types of systems, that without Comprehend companies have no
way to answer questions across them. The abundance of these systems, which you
allude to, is a big part of the problem that we solve.

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jayzee
Congrats guys! This is amazing stuff!!

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gleb
Congrats!

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kookiekrak
Congrats Rick and Jud!

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ericz
Congrats guys!

