Hoboken, New Jersey: December 17, 2020: Castor, a leading provider of clinical trial technology, today announced the launch of its scalable end-to-end decentralized clinical trial (DCT) platform.
With this launch, Castor is meeting the increasing demand in the market for technology that makes trials more patient centric and enables a hybrid approach (in-home or site-based) to trial visits, which has been accelerated by the pandemic. The platform includes modules to support remote enrollment, remote eConsent, native patient-facing apps, a complete EDC, and integrated real-time reporting capabilities.
On launching the DCT platform, Castor CEO Derk Arts, MD, PhD, said: “Castor has always had a strong focus on patient-centric and technology-enabled trials, as I believe these trials will become the reference standard for the life sciences industry. In the past nine months we focused our product development on creating a platform that makes these trials scalable, as we see an enormous bottleneck in the industry on launching these technologically challenging trials in acceptable timelines.”
The launch comes on the back of a high impact year for Castor, in which they supported the World Health Organization with their landmark Solidarity trials on COVID vaccines and treatments, and supported more than 300 COVID-related trials pro bono. In the second half of the year, commercial growth was 383% compared to the same period in 2019. A major commercial milestone was winning a contract for multiple cross-country eConsent projects with a top 10 pharma company.
Castor will be working closely with the recently launched Decentralized Trials & Research Alliance (DTRA) as one of the founding members to ensure the successful adoption of this technology.
Craig Lipset, DTRA Co-Convener and Castor Advisory Board member, said: “The pandemic has catalyzed the adoption of decentralized clinical trials, and sponsors are increasingly making it clear that there is no going back. While many embraced flexible participation as a necessity for business continuity, they are committing to these approaches to improve patient access, experience, and diversity.”
Castor’s key achievements in 2020 include:
- Raised a $12M Series A from Two Sigma Ventures with participation from Hambrecht Ducera Growth Ventures and existing investor INKEF Capital
- Powering 300+ COVID projects pro bono at 1,750+ hospitals across 35+ countries
- Supporting the World Health Organization Solidarity trials
- Launched video-enabled electronic informed consent (eConsent) solution
- Partnered with Click Therapeutics to provide solutions for conducting decentralized clinical trials
- Partnered with Datavant to enable efficient use of real-world data in clinical trials and registries
- Appointed Ben Cons, PhD as Chairman of its Board of Directors
- Developed Advisory Board with industry leaders including Craig Lipset, Cherié L. Butts, PhD, and Sarah F. Fisher
About Castor
Based in the United States and The Netherlands, Castor is an international health-tech company founded by CEO Derk Arts, MD, PhD. Their cloud-based clinical data platform simplifies the clinical trial process, from recruitment to analysis, for researchers worldwide.
More than 65,000 researchers across 90 countries are using Castor to supercharge their research. Castor’s platform has supported more than 4,000 commercial and academic studies that cover a broad range of therapeutic areas including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, rare diseases, infectious diseases, and oncology. Researchers on the platform generate vast amounts of data from traditional and remote trials, and Castor recently reached milestones of 250,000,000 data points and 2,200,000 enrolled patients. Castor’s goal is to make the world’s research data reusable, enabling AI-driven clinical trials, and ultimately creating a future in which they maximize the impact of data through reuse.
In 2020, Castor raised a $12M Series A from Two Sigma Ventures with participation from Hambrecht Ducera Growth Ventures and existing investor INKEF Capital. Castor previously raised a $6.25M seed round from INKEF Capital in 2018.
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/ciwit-b-v-
Twitter: www.twitter.com/castor