What is Lindus Health?
We run clinical trials and health research for biotech and healthtech startups, so patients can benefit from new treatments sooner. All new medical treatments have to undergo clinical trials to show they’re safe and effective. We have a software platform that lets us find participants for clinical trials, design trials and run them efficiently.
Our software platform also lets participants in clinical trials and health research take part from the comfort of their own home, rather than making frequent trips to busy healthcare sites!
How has the business evolved since its launch?
Michael and I founded Lindus Health in March 2021. Our vision has always been to use software to run entire clinical trials faster and more effectively. We initially launched just the patient recruitment part of our platform, helping mainly universities like Oxford and Imperial recruit patients for trials faster. We then launched our end to end trial platform in January 2022.
How are you funded?
In October 2021, we raised a $5M seed round from VCs including Firstminute Capital, Presight, Seedcamp, with support from Angels in the healthtech space including Vishal Gulati, Alex Zavoronkovs (founder of Insilico Medicine) and James Dacombe (founder of Comind).
What types of clients do you work with?
Our clients are mainly biotech and healthtech startups in the UK, Germany and US. They need to run clinical trials to show their products are safe and effective, to achieve regulatory approval, and to begin selling to large health providers like the NHS.
For example, we’re currently running a trial for Habitual, who have a digital therapeutic and total diet replacement that strives to help reverse type 2 diabetes.
What are some of the key challenges of clinical trials?
For companies looking to run clinical trials, trials are slow, expensive and delay is the norm – 86% of clinical trials are delayed due to poor patient recruitment. These costs are ultimately passed on to patients in the form of more expensive drugs and treatments and the 10 years it takes on average to develop a new drug or treatment.
For patients participating in clinical trials, technology uptake is low, so patients must take time out to visit physical hospital sites to participate. I experienced this first hand when I participated in one a COVID vaccine trial. Participants had to trek into a hospital once a month – including during the height of the pandemic – to fill out paper forms that could have been easily collected online.
How is Lindus Health addressing an unmet need?
For companies looking to run clinical trials, our software platform helps them run clinical trials transformationally faster. We are usually able to complete clinical trials three times faster than competing solutions, saving these companies years of runway.
We have a patient-friendly web app that makes it easier for patients to participate in clinical trials from home. Our product also provides appointment reminders, video calls and instructions to keep patients in the loop.
What does the future hold?
Today, anyone with a laptop and a credit card can build and release a consumer or even a B2B SaaS product. But building a new product in healthcare can take decades and cost millions of dollars, mostly due to the expense and time to run clinical trials.
We want to make creating new healthcare treatments as easy as creating new consumer and business products. We’ll do this by making it radically faster to design and conduct clinical trials, validate the safety and efficacy of new healthcare products, while keeping patients safe.
We have some exciting feature releases planned, such as a one that greatly simplifies the manual process of designing a clinical trial, and a feature to help clinicians involved in clinical trial delivery manage their workflow. Ultimately, we’re just getting started and will continue to fulfil our mission of accelerating clinical trials so patients can benefit from new treatments.
Meri Beckwith is cofounder at Lindus Health.