We are honored to lead Deep 6’s Series A to help them continue to accelerate the process of bringing life-saving therapies to market. Clinical trials are a vital part of developing new, cutting-edge therapies that can improve patient outcomes, but current methods of identifying qualified patients to recruit for participation are expensive and inefficient. In some cases, researchers spend a full year combing through records and fail to identify a single patient.

Both trial sponsors and healthcare providers are searching in the dark when it comes to setting up a trial: trial sponsors have no efficient way to know whether a healthcare provider has patients that qualify for a study without first spending money to activate that provider as a trial site, and healthcare providers may not be aware of new trials their patients could be eligible for. Furthermore, trial protocol designers have little guidance on which of the hundreds of qualifying criteria in a protocol — many of which are “nice to have,” but not vital to the trial — are too restrictive to achieve enrollment goals. The errors from best guesses that compound at each stage of initiating a clinical trial come at massive financial costs: each day a drug is delayed to market costs the trial sponsor $600k-$8M in lost revenue, and over 90% of delayed trials are at least a month behind schedule.

Deep 6 helps the clinical trials ecosystem cut through this multi-turn recruitment process by enabling trial sponsors and health systems to automatically scan patient health records to match patients against recruitment criteria in minutes while still maintaining HIPAA compliance, allowing research coordinators to focus on recruiting patients. This efficiency propagates upward quickly, allowing trial sponsors and health systems to decide whether to activate a trial site based on the number of qualified patients available. Even further upstream, trial sponsors can improve their trial design by iterating on protocol design based on immediate feedback, rather than waiting for a year to reevaluate after millions of dollars have been invested and patient recruitment has failed.

In making patient identification and upstream activities data-driven, Deep 6 has already saved some customers so much time that they have taken on additional trials. Deep 6’s customers today include Cedars Sinai Medical Center and Texas Medical Center, among several other large health systems across the U.S., in addition to a number of large pharmaceutical and medical device companies. We look forward to joining them on this journey to bring new cures to patients faster and accelerate innovation in healthcare.