We’re very excited to lift the lid on our public launch, alongside $5m in seed funding from leading technology and healthcare investors including Firstminute Capital, Presight Capital, Seedcamp, Hambro Perks,Amino Collective, and Calm/Storm!
Our mission stems from the experience of our founding team. Michael was previously a Special Adviser to the UK Prime Minister. Meri was a venture capitalist, investing in healthcare companies. Both are frequent trial participants; Meri took part in one of the Covid vaccine trials, which felt “like stepping into a time machine. This was one of the best funded trials in history but research was done on pen and paper and participants had to go into a hospital at the height of the pandemic to fill out forms.” During his time in Government, Michael “heard time and time again that the way clinical trials are conducted is broken. This means that patients are missing out on lifesaving treatments. To fix this requires a totally new business model for clinical trials. So we founded Lindus Health to do just that and to enable the next generation of healthcare companies.”
THE PROBLEM
Over the last 30 years life expectancy in developed countries has stagnated. There have been few, if any, advances in frontline treatments for the majority of common chronic conditions, while pharma are focused on increasingly niche indications. The fundamental cause of all of this is clinical trials.
Clinical trials are the core of healthcare research. They’re needed to assess the safety and efficacy of new treatments. They’re also getting increasingly expensive over time, making new medicines cost exponentially more and limiting the number of new treatments available.
There are two main drivers of this: incumbent organisations, and antiquated technology. The incumbents, like Contract Research Organisations (CROs), are old-fashioned service organisations that operate on a cost-plus business model, outsourcing almost all aspects of trial delivery. This means they have neither the incentive nor the levers to make clinical trials more efficient. In tandem, most trials are labour-intensive and still delivered on pen and paper or use a mess of different technology systems, meaning that costs are high and data quality is poor. The result? The cost of an average clinical trial has roughly doubled every 9 years for the last 50 years; it now costs $1bn to bring a new treatment to market. These costs are passed on to healthcare systems, and ultimately to patients.
SO WHAT ARE WE DOING ABOUT IT?
We’re building the world’s first full stack clinical trial platform, to conduct faster, safer clinical trials, improving health outcomes for everyone. We want to be a one-stop-shop for innovative healthcare companies, handling all aspects of trial design, recruitment and delivery. This would replace either dealing with a mix of academic labs or designing a trial in house and relying on a slow, expensive CRO to deliver. Unlike US players like Medable and Science37 who cater to big pharma, we recognise that biotech and healthtech startups are developing the next generation of exciting treatments. We’re building a platform specifically for them, and are lowering the barriers by taking equity as payment rather than cash up front.
Despite only having founded the company 6 months ago, we’ve had a big impact, recruiting over 4,000 patients to 25 clinical trials and studies in areas like type 2 diabetes, depression, cancer and vaccine development.
To continue fulfilling our mission, we’re announcing a $5m seed round. Investors include leading European and US investors, Firstminute Capital, Presight Capital, Seedcamp, Hambro Perks, Amino Collective, Calm/Storm Ventures. Angel investors include Mehdi Ghissassi (Deepmind), Alex Zhavoronkov (Insilico Medicine), Marc Warner (Faculty AI), James Dacombe (CoMind), Henry de Zoete (Look After My Bills), and Vishal Gulati (healthtech.vc).
The seed funding will be used to scale our team, with a focus on bringing together the best individuals and practices from both digital technology and life sciences. We’re supported by world-class industry advisors, Tamsin Berry (Biotech investor and previously Head of UK Government Life Sciences), and Shaun Treweek (editor of the Trials journal). Early employees include Nik Haldimann (co-founder and CTO), Luke Twelves (primary care lead), and Rebecca de Rome (operations and growth lead).
Whether you’re a planning a clinical trial, want to participate in research or just interested in the space, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch and help us accelerate the development of new treatments!