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.

Six years ago, a band of neuroscientists from the University of California, San Francisco combined decades of research and jumped into the hunt for an off-the-shelf cell therapy. Now, that team is sprinting toward the clinic with a treatment for epilepsy — but first, it’s making a pit stop at the venture well.

Neurona Therapeutics unveiled a $41.5 million round on Tuesday morning, bringing the San Francisco-based biotech’s total raise to $135 million. The cash will be used to advance the company’s pipeline, including an upcoming Phase I/IIa for its lead candidate, NRTX-1001, in chronic focal epilepsy.

One of the earliest employees at AI biotech Recursion Pharmaceuticals is leading a new company, and he’s just closed a hefty Series A to get things moving.

Enveda Biosciences pulled in $51 million in the raise, the company announced Tuesday morning, with the goal of pushing some of its preclinical programs further along. Led by CEO Viswa Colluru, Enveda aims to research how machine learning can utilize natural biology to create new therapies for Wilson’s Disease, NASH and Parkinson’s disease, among others.

As the Biden administration tries to wrangle the details of its infrastructure bill, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-OR) took a concrete step forward on drug pricing reforms on Tuesday and unveiled five principles for such reforms, including providing Medicare with the ability to negotiate prices.

“Allowing the Secretary of HHS to negotiate the price Medicare will pay creates a much needed mechanism to achieve fairer prices when the market has failed to do so,” Wyden wrote.

Endpoints News turned five years old over the weekend. I wanted to mark the happy occasion by extending our deepest gratitude to Endpoints’ premium subscribers while outlining several other ways to support us as we go broader and get bigger this year and beyond.

Same as any business, we’ve got to create value and get paid for delivering it. So if you depend on Endpoints to stay abreast on biopharma developments, we depend on you too.