Growing From A Feasibility Platform To A Clinical Trials Marketplace

We started out as a feasibility provider

Inato spent several years after its founding in 2016, supporting our biopharmaceutical sponsor partners with feasibility and site selection. We became highly experienced working across 2000+ sites and with 5000+ doctors globally.

Our feasibility platform and professional services team helped our sponsor partners benefit from greater efficiency, better user experience, and data centralization. In digitizing the feasibility process, Inato also became significantly experienced in cutting costs and timelines for clinical trials. We reduced costs of study startup by 9% for leading pharmaceutical clients by recommending fewer but more effective sites for studies. We also either maintained or reduced site selection timelines while maintaining investigator response rates of 72%.

But we soon discovered our sponsors’ and the industry need

That said, feasibility has its limitations. Specifically, digitizing site selection does not solve patient recruitment challenges. Today, 5% of sites (tapped sites) conduct 70% of clinical research. This limits sponsors from reaching the vast majority of patients at the remaining 95% of sites. As there has been no correlation proven between tapped sites and performance on a trial, the sponsor’s bias for maintaining existing relationships with tapped sites rather than expanding to the vast majority of qualified and experienced sites creates an exclusive clinical trials ecosystem that is nearly impossible to penetrate, and one where in the patients that desperately need trial therapies but who cannot access tapped sites, ultimately lose out.

To exacerbate this industry gap, sponsors are risk averse to partnering with a large number of new sites, and similarly, most sites do not have the visibility to partner with sponsors.

We listened to the feasibility and site selection challenges of sponsors and sites and understood that traditional approaches focus on the sponsor and overlook sites and patients. It became clear that optimizing processes won’t be sufficient to improve patient recruitment. We believe that to have a significantly positive impact, we need to reinvent the way that sponsors and sites partner.

We believe that a new model is required to expand the pool of patients involved in clinical research - a model of a trials marketplace, which does not impose any added risk or burden for the sponsor. Our model flips the traditional approach by allowing sites to apply to participate in the trials that are best aligned with their interest and that of their patients.

The clinical trials industry needs a trials marketplace, so we are building one

With our unique marketplace, we comprehensively qualify and match the sites best suited for sponsor clinical trials based on the site’s experience and capabilities, competition, resources, doctor qualifications, and interest. We use site and public data to compile the site qualifications, as well as data from interactions with PIs to determine their interest in a trial. We then help sites deliver on their operational commitments to your trial to ensure success without any added burden to the sponsor. This combination of data and services powers our unique site to trial matching.

The marketplace is two-sided and growing with our launch on June 18th 2020. It offers benefits to sites in addition to sponsors including being free to sites and helping sponsors realize significant cost savings in study startup and timelines.

Leveraging our feasibility expertise in this new mission

Our past experience uniquely positions us to execute and succeed in building this industry leveling marketplace. We have worked with several thousand sites globally from our feasibility days when we correlated the signals of performance to matching. Today, we are tapping into this feasibility experience to recommend the best site matches for sponsor studies by aligning interests across the marketplace. Additionally, we are making the most of our technology for data analysis, as well as our experienced team of doctors, data scientists and operational experts who bring the best in class service to sponsors and sites in our marketplace.

Our combination of subject matter expertise and experienced professionals allow us to support our marketplace sponsor partners in an unparalleled way - by matching them with the most capable sites, helping them expand to diverse patient populations, and ensuring the sites they select successfully perform on their trials with no added risk to the sponsor. Learn more on our website and don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team via contact@inato.com

Feedback, comments, questions? Reach out to us at contact@inato.com!