MolecularMatch up to six employees.
MolecularMatch’s service will be free to doctors and their patients. Executives say the company will derive its revenue from pharmaceutical companies who would pay a per patient referral fee in order to be connected with patients. Currently, many clinical trials do not have adequate enrollment numbers by the time the trial opens.
Coker says the current patient recruitment process is like a “net with really huge holes in it,” costing pharmaceutical companies between $10,000 to $15,000 per patient in recruitment costs. “Dear doctor” letter campaigns and other recruitment plans have a very low success rate, he added.
MolecularMatch’s technology can drop this recruitment cost by 90 percent. (Coker says the company is speaking with two drug companies and expects to have contracts in place by its July launch.)
“We’ll be the intermediary,” Coker says. “Pharma can’t speak directly to them, but we can gain information on what patients are looking for or why a patient didn’t qualify for a trial so that they (drug companies) can augment or tailor their trial to make it better.”
MolecularMatch licensed its technology from the University of Texas earlier this month and has raised $3.1 million from investors such the Goose Society, the so-called Grand Order of Successful Entrepreneurs whose members include Vanguard Ventures founder and Rice University professor Jack Gill and Rod Canion, founder of Compaq Computer.
Ultimately, using technology to manage the data deluge in health care will mean better care for cancer patients. Oncologists in a typical private practice do not have time to evaluate the data that’s now available to assess all of possible drug combinations or which clinical trials would best serve patients. MolecularMatch, does that work instead, in effect creating customized treatment plans for each patient, Welsh says.
“Instead of doing three rounds of chemo first, we deal with the mutations upfront,” he added. “It’s a better way to treat patients.”
