Clinical trial data platform Lokavant spins out from parent company Roivant

The company, which announced new hires, has been growing its 3x year-over-year since its founding

Lokavant is a company looking to fix the fragmentation problem in clinical trials, which has been caused by the number of trials nearly quadrupling since 2010, leading to far more data being generated. It does this by aggregating and integrating real-time data from disparate trial data sources and using it to provide advanced analytics, allowing teams to plan and manage their studies and surface insights.

The company was incubated by Roivant Sciencess in 2020, and piloted with numerous Roivant biotech "Vants" as customers, but now it has decided to go out on its own, announcing on Tuesday that it has formally spun-off from its parent company. This news comes only a few months after Lokavant raised a $21 million round of funding.  

"Lokavant’s founding team initially worked within Roivant Health, and directly experienced the challenges of global clinical trials from the perspective of a pharmaceutical sponsor, working with multiple vendors and data sources," Rohit Nambisan, CEO and co-founder of Lokavant, told VatorNews.  

"This experience endowed the team with a deep knowledge of the problem, and the opportunity to iterate on and validate the solution on real studies, a rare opportunity for a novel technology company focused on clinical research. From this validation, the company was able to confirm the value of the solution and generate actual ROI, supporting claims on how the technology creates value for sponsors and CROs."

The New York City-based Lokavant works with pharma R&D sponsors and CROs running late phase global clinical trials, providing them with flexible data unification, so they can ingest, standardize, and aggregate data wherever it sits in real time. The company also provides deep data analytics using active and historic trial data, including site data and investigator data. 

Applications for Lokavant include milestone tracking, risk detection, study planning, enrollment forecasting, and medical monitoring. 

In 2020, the company entered its first multi-year enterprise license agreement with Parexel; on Tuesday it revealed that, since its founding, it has increased its customer base of sponsors and CROs by 3x year-over-year, though the company does not disclose how many customers it has currently, though it did say that, through the use of its data asset of over 2,000 trials, its customers have seen a 70x improvement in enrollment forecast accuracy, over $1 million in cost savings from patient retention, and six months' time savings from detecting site noncompliance issues, on a per trial basis.

Along with the news of its decoupling, Lokavant also announced three new hires, including AJ Mills, who spent more than two decades in various business development roles at technology and life sciences companies, including Clario, as well as as executive vice president of sales at ICON.

"AJ brings decades of experience in clinical trials and scaling sales teams, specifically oriented towards transformative technologies, such as Lokavant’s platform. His domain knowledge and veteran leadership will help Lokavant scale our global commercial operations across the pharma ecosystem, ultimately accelerating therapeutics development broadly across the market," said Nambisan.

The company also announced the hiring of Doug Weatherhead as vice president of marketing; Weatherhead previously worked at decentralized clinical trial technology company Castor as VP of marketing, as well as Medable, IBM, GlaxoSmithKline, and the U.S. Navy.

"Doug has extensive experience in B2B SaaS startups companies, building successful marketing teams in this space three different times. He has a rare skillset as a marketing practitioner of possessing a strong strategic mindset, technical and business acumen, yet also able to deliver tactically and at an operational level," said Nambisan. 

Finally, the company brought on Meredith Dees on as vice president of product; she previously worked at CTI Clinical Trial and Consulting, as well as inVentiv Health Clinical as a business systems analyst, along with ICON, ERT, and, most recently, Science 37, where she served as director of product management.

"Meredith comes to Lokavant with deep product and domain expertise in clinical trial technology from esteemed companies in the field. Her ability to organize market needs into development and enhancement of a scalable and configurable platform has already helped Lokavant achieve market resonance," Nambisan said. 

"As we continue to evolve our product roadmap, Meredith will help ensure that Lokavant’s platform encompasses all use cases across the clinical trial value chain – from protocol design and startup to execution and close-out."

As for what's next for Lokavant now that it's its own company, Nambisan says it will be focused on solving the biggest challenges in clinical trials today by leveraging advanced analytics and AI.

"Our vision is to be the platform that empowers all clinical trial stakeholders with critical data and insights for smarter and faster trials. No trial should fail due to operational issues and Lokavant’s platform offers study teams confidence and predictability in decision making, ensuring that operational issues are predicted and mitigated at the earliest," he explained.

"Lokavant is growing rapidly at a time when the market is retracting, and most companies are shrinking. This is validation that our customers are seeing real value from the platform and justification that our offering is transformative to the future of clinical research."

(Image source: lokavant.com)