Recruiting patients to clinical trials – particularly those of color – has always been an uphill battle. And many startups are taking aim at not only expanding access for everyday people but also making the process more convenient.
It is in that context that Topography Health, based in New York and Los Angeles, launched its clinical trials platform last week with a $27.5 million Series A funding round. In coming out of stealth mode, it outlined an approach of leveraging community physicians to run clinical trials. Traditionally, clinical trials are usually run at medical centers at a centralized location.
Topography raised the funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Bain Capital Ventures, which led the round, with Zillow Co-founder Spencer Rascoff, former Flatiron Health Chief Medical Officer Bobby Green, and One Medical Founder Tom Lee also contributing. In 2020, Andreessen Horowitz led the initial $6M seed round for Topography, the company revealed.
By engaging community physicians across the United States, they hope to make clinical drug trials accessible to more Americans with a variety of diseases, from terminal illnesses to moderate chronic illnesses. The hope is that this model of clinical trials will reach marginalized communities historically underrepresented or excluded from clinical trials.
Additionally, Topography’s platform will allow patients to participate in studies they previously did not have access to due to limited locations of the studies.
“We want to expand research availability to patients in the community setting. There are times when the standard of care is very good. There are also times when the standard of care is limited, like cancer or Alzheimer’s,” said Alexander Saing-Amand, CEO and co-founder of Topography Health. “When standard of care is limited it is very important for patients to have access to new therapies. Many do not.”
Topography’s full-stack, data science platform provides training and assistance for a national network of physicians in scaling clinical drug trials by helping them reach those patients in their communities who could benefit. Specifically, the platform recommends studies, recruits patients, and oversees staff, reducing the business and administrative burdens on physicians, ultimately aiming to make clinical trials and their benefits available to patients who need it.
“Community doctors have close relationships with their patients. And patients trust their own doctors. We’re offering those physicians the staff and software they need to run trials, so that their patients have access to clinical research for the first time,” said Saing-Amand in an email. “The great majority of physicians don’t have the resources they need to offer their patients access to clinical trials. This is particularly true in community practices and underserved communities.”
Additionally, Topography’s digital workflow technology provides one place to manage data from all trials in a central location, helping the process run smoother. Further, the platform empowers physicians to curate a list of potential trials for each of their patients by analyzing patient records. Of note, Topography’s method allows for patients from historically marginalized communities to receive information on drug trials that could help them. As a result, Topography envisions this technology providing a method for shaping results of clinical trials to see how drugs perform throughout diverse communities, especially those historically overlooked in past trials.
A Hopkins Biotech Newtwork article published in November 2020 addressed the issues of not including diverse populations in clinical drug trials. For instance, only 11% of patients in the remdesivir Gilead-funded trial (GS-YOU.S.-540-5773) were Black Americans, even though Covid disproportionately impacted minorities, the report said.
“Lack of patient diversity in clinical trials is a huge bottleneck in the drug development process, and Topography solves for this by focusing on empowering physicians to efficiently build clinical research and investigative capabilities into their core practice operations,” said Julie Yoo, General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz in the news release. “With the boom in pharma and biotech funding, demand for new investigators also continues to outstrip supply, creating large opportunities to unlock novel research capacity across physicians and their patients.”
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