Mon­ey is fly­ing for com­pa­nies promis­ing to rev­o­lu­tion­ize the way clin­i­cal tri­als are con­duct­ed. Leaps by Bay­er is the lat­est to get be­hind one of these play­ers, lead­ing a $200 mil­lion ven­ture round for Hu­ma Ther­a­peu­tics and its dig­i­tal “hos­pi­tal at home” tech.

Lon­don-based Hu­ma un­veiled a $130 mil­lion Se­ries C on Wednes­day, which it will use to ex­pand its dig­i­tal plat­form in the US, Asia and the Mid­dle East. As part of the round, the com­pa­ny can ex­er­cise an­oth­er $70 mil­lion com­mit­ment lat­er on.

“We’re al­ready demon­strat­ing how ‘hos­pi­tal at home’ can trans­form health­care, and how de­cen­tral­ized clin­i­cal tri­als can ad­vance re­search in ways that weren’t imag­in­able even one year ago,” CEO Dan Vah­dat said in a state­ment. “Now we want to ac­cel­er­ate the pace of change and con­tin­ue to in­no­vate for bet­ter care and re­search world­wide.”

Hu­ma boasts wear­able tech­nol­o­gy and a pa­tient app that helps re­searchers pre­screen par­tic­i­pants, con­duct re­mote vis­its via tele­health, track med­ica­tion and col­lect re­al-life da­ta. The com­pa­ny says its plat­form can dou­ble clin­i­cal ca­pac­i­ty and re­duce hos­pi­tal read­mis­sions by over a third, with pa­tient ad­her­ence lev­els of over 90%.

Hi­tachi Ven­tures led the round along with Leaps by Bay­er, and new share­hold­ers in­clude Sam­sung Next, Sony In­no­va­tion Fund by IGV, Unilever Ven­tures, HAT Tech­nol­o­gy & In­no­va­tion Fund, Nikesh Aro­ra (for­mer pres­i­dent of Soft­Bank) and Michael Diek­mann (chair­man of Al­lianz).

Hu­ma isn’t the on­ly tech de­vel­op­er at­tract­ing in­vestors with its de­cen­tral­ized tri­al ap­proach. Last week, Sci­ence 37 land­ed uni­corn sta­tus when it agreed to a SPAC merg­er with LifeSci Ac­qui­si­tion II Corp. Ac­cord­ing to a re­port Sci­ence 37 con­duct­ed it­self, CEO David Co­man said more than 80% of bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies plan on con­duct­ing a clin­i­cal tri­al us­ing at least some de­cen­tral­ized el­e­ments this year, though near­ly 60% don’t have the in­ter­nal ca­pa­bil­i­ties to do it.

Back in Feb­ru­ary, Dublin-based CRO Icon struck a deal to ac­quire PRA Health Sci­ences for $12 bil­lion to fo­cus on de­cen­tral­ized tri­als — a move which would com­bine the 5th- and 6th-largest CROs by 2020 rev­enue. Last month, Ther­mo Fish­er an­nounced plans to ac­quire PPD — a CRO that boasts de­cen­tral­ized tri­al ca­pa­bil­i­ties — for $17.4 bil­lion. And back in No­vem­ber, soft­ware provider Med­able bagged a $91 mil­lion Se­ries C to build out its vir­tu­al tri­al plat­form.

“The pan­dem­ic has ex­posed weak­ness­es across health sys­tems around the world but through col­lab­o­ra­tion, in­no­va­tion, and com­pas­sion­ate lead­er­ship Hu­ma can sup­port faster and safer care for pa­tients through dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies and rapid ac­cess to treat­ments by ac­cel­er­at­ing clin­i­cal re­search,” Hu­ma’s board di­rec­tor Clau­dia Suess­muth Dy­ck­er­hoff said in a state­ment.

The FDA on Friday released about 10 million doses of J&J’s vaccine for use, and disposed of another 60 million doses that were manufactured at the now-shuttered Emergent BioSolutions facility in Baltimore where cross-contamination occurred.

The agency said it’s not yet ready to allow the Emergent plant to be included in the J&J EUA, but that may occur soon. FDA came to the decision to authorize some of the doses after reviewing facility records and quality testing results.

A common approach to treating heart failure with induced pluripotent stem cells involves grafting sheets of cells onto the surface of the heart to improve vascularization and blood flow. It’s the easiest method of transplantation — but you run the risk of not making an electrical connection with the heart and the cells not synchronizing with the patient’s heart muscle.

So what if you could inject spherical clusters of heart cells directly into the heart muscle wall? For Heartseed, that’s now the $37 million question.

Senate Finance Democrats took aim at Biogen’s pricey new Alzheimer’s drug on Thursday, but members on both sides of the aisle at a separate appropriations hearing didn’t question acting FDA commissioner Janet Woodcock on the approval.

“I was appalled that Biogen priced their Alzheimer’s drug approved by the FDA at $56,000 per year — I’m not going to debate whether this is effective or not, but it’s double the household median income for Michiganders over the age of 65,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) said at the finance hearing.