Scientist.com announced it raised $24M in an equity financing co-led by Boston-based Leerink Transformation Partners (LTP) and San Francisco and Boston-based 5AM Ventures. The funding will help the company expand its pharmaceutical outsourcing marketplace.
Last year marked a six-year low for new drug approvals; the industry spent $150 billion on R&D in 2016 but produced only 22 new medicines, well below the five-year average (2012-2016) of 29. The cost of bringing a single new drug to market has now reached as much as $7 billion, and profit margins have declined precipitously over the last 20 years.
“It is too expensive and time-consuming to bring new drugs to market,” Jared Kesselheim, Managing Partner of LTP said. “The outsourcing platform built by Scientist.com has enabled pharmaceutical companies to run drug programs in less time and at a fraction of today’s cost. We expect the marketplace to continue to be a game-changer for life science research, creating huge efficiencies for pharma companies and the entire scientific community.”
Scientist.com currently has multi-year partnerships with 12 large pharmaceutical companies and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Thousands of commercial suppliers (CROs) have already joined the Scientist.com network.
Scientist.com is extending the benefits of its platform to smaller, early-stage biopharmaceutical companies. An increasing number of biopharma start-ups are outsourcing many or all the laboratory tests, services and studies needed to run a complex, multi-year drug discovery and development program. A private marketplace located at app.scientist.com enables these virtual companies to run an entire drug program, from concept to clinic, using only their laptop computers and mobile phones.