French clinical trial company Inato has bagged a $14 million series A round as it seeks to “unlock the potential of the many unengaged research sites.”
The series A funding came from Obvious Ventures, Cathay Innovation, Serena and Fly Ventures and will be used to boost its platform for a more modern, inclusive set of clinical trials.
How? “The Inato platform increases the pool of available patients engaged in clinical trials by unlocking research site potential,” it said in a statement. “The platform matches the best sites for any given study and ensures that site partners in the Inato network are successfully delivering trials.”
“Five percent of the world’s research sites are conducting the vast majority of today’s clinical trials. When you consider that the average cost of bringing a drug to market is around $2 billion, with about two-thirds of those costs tied to clinical trials, it’s clear there’s an urgent need for greater efficiency,” said Inato co-founder and CEO Kourosh Davarpanah.
“Our mission is to bring new doctors and their patients into the clinical research ecosystem to unlock the potential of the many unengaged research sites—so biopharma can bring innovative therapies to market faster.”
“There are thousands of sites around the world that are fully capable of recruiting patients but are currently not taking part in the research process,” added Davarpanah.
Inato has partnered with a number of life science companies and created a data set of historical site performance covering 1,500 studies, 17,000 sites and 700,000 patients across 80-plus countries.
Through this, it reckons it has “significantly improved” the platform’s predictive capabilities: Tapping into its figures, the Parisian company said its algorithm can help reduce the number of sites needed in a study by nearly one-third (29%).
The company was founded back in 2015 and got off a €1.3 million seed round in 2017 to help form its artificial-intelligence-based data collection tool for studies.