On the VatorNews podcast, Steven Loeb speaks with Meri Beckwith, co-founder of Lindus Health, a company that calls itself an “an anti-CRO” running faster and more reliable trials for life science companies
0:43 - Beckwith talks about his journey: Beckwith started working in life sciences venture capital, investing in biotech medtech companies, and started Lindus Health after the companies said their biggest problem was running fast, reliable clinical trials. At the same time, Beckwith decided to volunteer to take part in a couple of clinical trials, including one of the big COVID vaccine clinical trials, and was shocked by the reality of it and what a broken and difficult process it was.
5:58 - A new kind of business model: The number one thing Lindus does differently is its business model, exclusively working on a fixed fee milestone basis. In other words, when a company chooses Lindus to run a clinical trial, they only pay once it hits milestones that represent progress in the clinical trial. This is in contrast to the way the rest of the industry works, which is an hourly billing business model, meaning they don't really have an incentive to do anything faster and more efficiently. The second thing Lindus does differently is it has a technology platform that it built in house, which helps it run an entire clinical trial faster and more reliably.
8:44 - Being an “anti-CRO”: CRO stands for contract research organization and these are private companies that run the vast majority of clinical trials. If you're a pharma or biotech company and you want to need to run clinical trials to show your product is safe and effective, you need to hire or buy an external company to run these trials for you. By “anti-CRO,” Lindus means its provides all the same services that a CRO does, but the two big differences are its business model, and its technology platform because CROs don't typically have any technology, it's like a pure services business model. And, frankly, "anti-CRO" is a snappy tagline that never fails to get conversation started.
12:56 - Decentralized trials: During COVID, there was this big rush to specifically digital or decentralized clinical trials, but the industry really quickly abandoned that post-COVID. Lindus doesn’t do only decentralized clinical trials; in fact, it's just totally agnostic and doesn’t care whether the trial was decentralized or runs entirely at physical sites, all the company cares about is that it is as efficient as possible. Sometimes that means running a completely digital trial, but that’s a small minority of cases; most trials for us are a blend of physical visits and remote follow-up.
18:52 - Recruitment: Lindus uses three different channels to find patients. One is a network of mainly family, doctors, ordinary care providers that the company has built, where Lindus gives them the tools to quickly scan their patient lists, see who might be eligible, and then refer those patients. It also has a social media patient recruitment effort, which companies can use and run a social media campaign to find the right patients. Finally, the company also partners with patient advocacy groups.
25:09 - Use case: One of Lindus’ customers is Miota, a developer of products for metabolic health. They're investigating a novel, prebiotic supplement for people with prediabetes. Lindus helped them design the study, assemble all the documents that they needed to get the study kicked off with the regulator, manage that process, and receive ethical approval to begin recruiting participants. The study involved taking the study product over three months, gathering data on potential adverse events, seeing how their blood sugar changed over time. The results showed significant reduction in blood sugar, as well as reduction in other markers associated with the progression to type 2 diabetes.
34:28 - Artificial intelligence: There’s a ton of applications for AI in clinical trials. Generally, the two that Lindus is using is AI to try and predict clinical trials success and outcomes, and to help design better clinical trials, so to interrogate the clinical trial design and suggest improvements. AI also helps proofread and improve patient-facing text and materials. So, it’s running in the background, making loads of processes incrementally more efficient, which actually as a huge impact.
36:48 - Focus areas: Lindus mostly focuses on specific therapy areas, and types of trials. It doesn't do oncology, like cancer drugs, or some more complex drugs in particularly niche or rare conditions. The company does a lot of work, particularly in metabolic, cardiovascular, respiratory, dermatology, reproductive health, as well as diagnostics and medical devices. And that's deliberate because it wants to remain focused.
Steven Loeb