Comprehend Receives Finance for Clinical Data Insight Tech
The software solutions company has partnered with Sequoia Capital and raised $8.4m (€6.4m) in Series A funding in order to expand its cloud-based clinical data insights software, Comprehend Clinical.
Speaking with Outsourcing-Pharma.com, Comprehend’s CEO Rick Morrison, said the finance will fund development of the platform which “pulls together clinical and operational data from different systems, making it easy for executives, study managers, clinicians and others to track and analyze studies.”
Contract research organisations (CROs) and pharma firms are faced with the issue that there are numerous data collection systems - from different vendors - used in an individual study, he continued.
To solve this, some companies “are trying to build data warehouses, the thought being that they'll move all data into a single, new database.
“Datawarehouses work great for manufacturing, for example, where you build a new manufacturing plant, install your systems, build the data warehouse, and none of the underlying systems change for a decade.”
However, “that is not the case in clinical trials, where there are regularly new systems being added and changed.”
Furthermore, according to Morrison, many CROs try to deal with this by using large teams of programmers writing one-off TLFs (Tables, Listings and Figures) in the background which can be expensive, prone to error and doesn’t scale.
“Comprehend can help them scale by simplifying the process of answering questions across these ever-changing underlying data systems.”
The Outlook is Cloudy
Outsourcing-Pharma.com previously caught up with Comprehend in June at DIA in Boston, where the firm announced it had partnered with eClinical solutions provider Merge Healthcare.
The company described itself as the only company to address the issue of clinical data insight using cloud-based software, though, from the show, it would seem the use of such technology has been infiltrating all sectors of the CRO and pharma world, with Datatrak One Clinical, INC Research and Novotech all talking about their latest cloud-based ventures.
Furthermore, the EFPIA has begun using Microsoft’s cloud-based software Windows Azure for its anti-counterfeiting system. The software will function across the EU and detects fake drugs by scanning product barcode at the point-of-dispensation.
