This innovative approach promises to streamline the trial matching process, enhancing patient engagement and accelerating medical research. The product launch will be followed by the start of a Seed investment round sized between €2-3M, to work towards accessible Personalized Health for everyone, globally.
“Like many chronic disease patients, my mother, unaware of when – if ever – curative treatment options would become available for her, perceived her health condition as something she had to carry through for the rest of her life.”
“Knowing the ever-increasing rate of new medicine developments, I couldn’t accept the fact that lack of appropriate technical solutions in the data and information age, would be the reason for her feeling lost while navigating her health journey. So, together with our multi-disciplinary team, we set out to build a patient-centric Personalized Health platform that addresses the current shortcomings of digital systems in healthcare, and, complementarily, enables more equitable and globally collaborative clinical research.”
For patients, when receiving news from your doctor for the first time about your diagnosis of a rare or chronic condition, everything can be overwhelming. Besides dealing with this shocking news, you are receiving a ton of vital information about your possible next steps and best practices. However, at that moment, probably the most challenging part is hearing that: “Currently, there are no treatments available for you…”.
This statement, however, may be accurate at that moment, but it does not necessarily need to be the case for the rest of that patient’s life. Promising new medicines and treatments are constantly being developed and are accessible to patients worldwide that are looking for better new treatments. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 27000 clinical studies for noncommunicable diseases (such as heart disease, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, etc.) are currently recruiting to offer patients new medicines [1]. However, staying up to date with all the recent developments in the clinical field is already a challenging task for overworked doctors and healthcare personnel, let alone for patients with no background in that field. So, how do we bridge this gap?
Introducing GRIP – a software platform developed by OASYS NOW in collaboration with partners in major academic medical centers, hospitals, and patient organizations – aims to tackle these challenges by acting as a digital Waiting Room for all patients waiting to receive new treatments as soon as they become available. Using GRIP, patients can take control of their electronic health records (EHR) and receive up-to-date information about the latest medicines and treatments available to them through clinical trials close to their homes.
On the other hand, for drug development companies, to accurately assess whether new medicines are specifically suitable for each patient, further eligibility checks need to occur at the clinical sites, which generally require several in-person visits by patients to these sites to collect the required information. A large part of this process, however, can also be conducted remotely using the right technologies. OASYS NOW aims to speed up this process by conducting most of these steps digitally through their platform. For example, using GRIP, patients would be able to securely collect their electronic health records (EHR) in one platform, which then automatically conducts these assessments between patients’ health records and the specific eligibility criteria of each clinical study.
Recruitment for clinical trials is the most significant cause of trial delays. Around 80% of trials fail to meet the initial enrollment target and timeline, and these delays can result in lost revenue of up to US $8 million per day for drug-developing companies [2]. The online platform for clinical trial matching, GRIP, addresses the critical need for a patient-centric approach in the patient recruitment process and aims to solve this challenge by streamlining the search for trials and facilitating a better fit between patient profiles and research studies.
“By harnessing the power of EHR data, OASYS NOW is setting new standards in the European realm of patient-matched clinical trials and advanced data analytics, their platforms could very well redefine how we approach clinical research and patient care.”
On December 1st, OASYS NOW is unveiling GRIP at the Slush Conference in Helsinki, where they have been shortlisted in the top 100 for a competition where world-class funds Accel, General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners, NEA, and Northzone are investing €1,000,000,000 in the best startup. OASYS NOW is invited by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) to celebrate this and the official launch of their product at NL Lounge together with participating guests such as the Ambassador of the Netherlands in Helsinki, Prince Constantijn van Oranje-Nassau, hundreds of founders, and ecosystem partners.
GRIP is available to the public starting today at www.oasysnow.com. The launch also marks the start of the Seed round of fundraising, where OASYS NOW is raising between €2-3M to further build out its platforms, expand its service to more European countries, and develop data processing tools to improve the extraction of insights from EHR.
