Clinical Net
Revolutionising the Drug Development Paradigm

The fight against COVID-19 was won through the heroic efforts of frontline healthcare professionals, who were supported by clinical trials that developed effective treatment medication and reliable vaccines at a never-before-seen pace. However, since the pandemic effects started to wane, clinical trial management has reverted to its traditional nature where siloed, sub-optimal trial processes across trial runners, sponsors, and patients cause promising drug candidates to spend years waiting for approval.

On a mission to change this paradigm and enable highly efficient clinical trials, London, UK-headquartered Clinical Net is developing a global platform to easily connect patients with clinical trials and automate key trial processes to accelerate drug development.

“Through our platform, we want to create an end-to-end system that holistically streamlines all trial processes through impactful automation and helps drug developers save time and resources,” says Nuria Coll Bastus, founder and CEO, Clinical Net.

Its platform is poised to revolutionise the world’s clinical trial paradigm by finally eliminating major bottlenecks in the field, saving millions in revenue, and bringing new treatments to people faster.

Clinical Net plans to bring its platform to market in four phases, each targeted to resolve a key issue witnessed by clinical trial stakeholders. The first one, slated for launch in November 2022, will help address patient recruitment issues.

Today, over 75 percent of all trials are delayed due to the lack of a robust and centralised avenue where organisations driving clinical trials can connect with relevant patients and healthy volunteers. Most clinical trial information available today is fragmented across multiple online databases, which are often outdated, difficult to navigate, and have rather basic filters that make it hard for individuals without know-how on the technicalities and terminology of a drug development study to identify the best clinical trial for them. Other trial recruitment solutions focus on allowing trial teams and sponsors to look for participants in patient databases, which is costly, time-consuming, and inefficient.

Clinical Net aims to mitigate this issue by offering a unified platform that seamlessly matches candidates with the most suitable clinical trial within 5 minutes, efficiently connects clinical trial teams with only one click, and allows real-time tracking of candidate enrolment processes.

Clinical Net’s global platform is designed to help patients access the most innovative treatments by easily connecting them with the most suitable clinical trial. Concurrently, it will help trial sponsors boost their participation rates through intelligent models capable of reducing recruitment timelines at a fraction of the cost of any other solution.

At the heart of Clinical Net’s ability to connect trial runners with best-suited candidates is its AI-driven algorithmic matchmaking technology. During the process, the AI generates highly personalised medical questions in easily comprehensible language based on preceding responses and detects critical patterns in the answers before linking them to its comprehensive clinical trial library. Unlike most patient recruitment solutions that address single studies or small pools of disease-specific studies, Clinical Net’s collection comprises datasets with over 50,000 ongoing trials globally.

Through its optimised process, Clinical Net hopes to replace the conventionally cumbersome recruitment process with an intuitive, easy-to-navigate, and accessible experience. Essentially, Clinical Net wants patients seeking trials and trial teams looking for participants to be connected easily and quickly.

Clinical Net’s consolidated trial information library and automated identification of relevant candidates are poised to reduce the personnel needed to manage datasets and improve the flow of patients and healthy participants. At the same time, by boosting a trial’s running time and cost savings, it aims to enable faster drug development and approval, giving pharma companies longer patent-protected exclusivity in the market and generating greater revenue.

Beyond the first phase, Clinical Net has a multi-year plan to develop platform capabilities that can strengthen clinical trial setup processes, decentralisation of clinical trials with robust management, and forecast the success of ongoing trials through powerful predictive analytics. From a portfolio standpoint, the company plans to launch a Health Module before Q2 2023. Through this free-to-use module, potential participants can automatically gather and structure their medical records, which are often fragmented across multiple GP practices, clinics and hospitals. The data transfer will be backed by GDPR regulations, enabling users to import, extract, and structure healthcare data before storing it in the secure and accessible Clinical Net platform. Above all, the upcoming Health module will allow users to self-drive healthcare, attain early diagnosis, make better treatment decisions, and gain access to the most innovative and cost-free treatments.

Moving forward, Nuria and her team want to drive a mindset shift in patients and doctors, from perceiving trials as the testing of unsafe products to looking at them as an avenue to leverage new therapeutic options.