Clinical trial startup Curebase bags $40 million in Series B funding to democratize access to clinical studies

One of the lessons learned from the covid pandemic is how research institutions, governments, and pharmaceutical companies worked together to develop efficient vaccines to cure the deadly coronavirus. The pandemic is also a reminder of the need to accelerate clinical drug development. That’s why San Francisco-based clinical trial startup Curebase is on a mission to bring quality medical innovations to patients faster and improve human wellbeing through more efficient clinical studies.

Today, Curebase announced it has secured $40 in Series B funding for its decentralized clinical trials and patient-centric software aimed at democratizing access to clinical studies. The round, which brings Curebasse total funding of $59 million, was led by Industry Ventures, with participation from new institutional investors including Acrew Capital, World Innovation Lab, and Positive Sum.

The funding also included existing investors GGV Capital, who led the Series A, Bold Capital, and Xfund. The round also included a strategic investment by global biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences to deepen their partnership with Curebase on implementing DCT and hybrid capabilities in interventional trials.

Curebase will use the new capital infusion to deepen its breadth of capabilities beyond the virtual experience via the more complex site and community healthcare interfaces, and more robust capabilities for interventional drug sponsors and global studies.

Founded in 2018 by Tom Lemberg, Curebase is a provider of decentralized clinical research software solutions and services to patients and medical providers. Curebase has built a digital clinical trial assistant that would alter how medical providers discover, activate, and administer clinical trials for their patients. Curebase said it aims to run clinical trials faster and cheaper than anyone else via software that reduces recruitment times, automates manual steps, and lets drug companies distribute their trials to clinics.

“We are pleased that investors are recognizing that Curebase is more than a software platform,” said company founder and CEO Tom Lemberg. “We are an end-to-end clinical trial company with global capabilities and an extensive site network of virtual and hybrid site staff that provides everything needed to successfully execute a better clinical trial.”

“It is more urgent than ever for the biopharmaceutical industry to transform the design and execution of our clinical programs so that we radically change the way patients experience clinical trials. We believe that by taking a human-centered design and technology-enabled approach – as Curebase does – we can co-design a process that more effectively brings treatment options to people in need,” said Matt Bryant, Head of Technology and Innovation at Gilead Sciences. “Curebase’s approach will help to improve the quality, speed, and patient diversity of clinical trials so that we have a more representative population in our clinical research.”

Over the past few years, clinical research has traditionally suffered from difficult enrollment, retention, and diversity. Curebase’s model enables the inclusion of underrepresented patient populations otherwise excluded from clinical trials and expands access overall to studies to solve this challenge.

The company’s virtual and hybrid research sites offer patients a unique opportunity to participate in clinical studies, regardless of their location via community provider facilities and home-based care. The Curebase platform empowers sponsors and physicians from practices of all sizes to conduct clinical research more efficiently, including private practices, independent clinics, and large academic research sites. Most importantly Curebase’s methods are primarily driven by patient centricity to expand access to clinical trials for any patient, anywhere.