The de­cen­tral­ized clin­i­cal tri­al in­dus­try went through a huge boom dur­ing the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic as biotechs and Big Phar­ma com­pa­nies alike were forced to shift gears. Look­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on that mo­men­tum, a San Fran­cis­co start­up is rais­ing funds to en­sure clos­er part­ner­ships with the com­mu­ni­ties DCTs serve.

Cure­base pulled to­geth­er a $40 mil­lion Se­ries B on Thurs­day, rough­ly 13 months af­ter clos­ing its Se­ries A. While on the sur­face this may seem like an­oth­er DTC com­pa­ny, CEO Tom Lem­berg tells End­points News the com­pa­ny is look­ing to sep­a­rate it­self from the pack by go­ing straight to the com­mu­ni­ty to bring greater di­ver­si­ty to clin­i­cal tri­als.

What sets Cure­base apart from most com­pa­nies in the DCT space, Lem­berg says, is the com­pa­ny ac­tive­ly seeks to part­ner with com­mu­ni­ty doc­tors. Lem­burg em­pha­sized that the com­pa­ny has part­nered with around 100 com­mu­ni­ty physi­cians, such as pri­ma­ry care doc­tors, ur­gent care sites, test­ing sites and spe­cial­ists through their op­er­at­ing sys­tem.

“We would lever­age the com­mu­ni­ty sites that are in those com­mu­ni­ties, we would lever­age dig­i­tal cam­paigns to reach pa­tients where we’re able to reach that di­verse pop­u­la­tion and we’re not lim­it­ed by peo­ple who can dri­ve in­to a few elite re­search cen­ters,” Lem­berg said.

Lem­berg is a life­long soft­ware en­gi­neer and un­der­grad­u­ate in com­put­er sci­ence at Har­vard. He be­came in­vest­ed in health­care bi­ol­o­gy and pas­sion­ate about tak­ing his tech­nol­o­gy back­ground to health­care, spawn­ing the Cure­base ef­fort.

The com­pa­ny has con­tin­ued to scale up and it now has over 120 peo­ple on staff, work­ing with sev­en dif­fer­ent pub­licly trad­ed com­pa­nies to run in­ter­ven­tion­al drug tri­als. Cure­base se­cured a $15 mil­lion Se­ries A last April, and Thurs­day’s round was led by In­dus­try Ven­tures and in­clud­ed new in­vestors Acrew Cap­i­tal, World In­no­va­tion Lab and Pos­i­tive Sum.

Ex­ist­ing in­vestors were GGV Cap­i­tal, which led their Se­ries A, Bold Cap­i­tal and Xfund. The round al­so in­clud­ed an in­vest­ment from Gilead to deep­en the ex­ist­ing part­ner­ship with Cure­base on im­ple­ment­ing DCT and hy­brid ca­pa­bil­i­ties in tri­als.

“We did our Se­ries B not be­cause we were run­ning out of cash, but be­cause we want­ed to ac­cel­er­ate our growth. We have re­al­ly am­bi­tious goals in terms of in­vest­ing in our soft­ware plat­form, con­tin­u­ing to ab­solute­ly in­vest in an amaz­ing pa­tient ex­pe­ri­ence,” Lem­berg said. “We want to ag­gres­sive­ly grow our site, op­er­at­ing sys­tem and site net­work to be able to reach more pa­tients in the com­mu­ni­ty.”

Apart from look­ing to scale up its clin­i­cal op­er­a­tions ef­forts and soft­ware de­vel­op­ment, the com­pa­ny is look­ing to go more glob­al. Cure­base is cur­rent­ly in four coun­tries, but Lem­berg said he would like to grow that to 10. The com­pa­ny’s ser­vices are avail­able in three lan­guages but would al­so like to of­fer them in 10 lan­guages by the end of the year.

President Joe Biden made clear in his “finish the job” State of the Union address last night that one of those jobs to be finished is insulin prices.

Biden’s push again to tackle insulin prices, after Republicans rebuffed the idea last summer and just after Biden won Medicare drug price negotiations/caps via the Inflation Reduction Act, shows how heavily he’s leaning into this work.

Six weeks into his new role at the helm of Teva Pharmaceutical, Richard Francis said it’s time to “get back to growth,” starting with a good look at the company’s priorities.

The chief executive has kicked off a strategic review, he announced during Teva’s quarterly call, which will continue over the next several months and produce results sometime in the middle of 2023. That means some pipeline cuts may be in store, he told Endpoints News, while declining to offer much more detail.

FDA Commissioner Rob Califf joined the heads of the CDC and NIH in the hot seat today before a key House subcommittee, explaining that there needs to be a much faster, more coordinated way to oversee vaccine safety, and that foreign biopharma inspections, halted for years due to the pandemic, are slowly ramping up again.

Califf, who stressed to the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health that the CDC also needs better data, made clear that the FDA’s ability to monitor the safety of vaccines “would also benefit greatly by a coordinated federal public health data reporting authority.”