TriNetX raises $40 million to simplify clinical research

TriNetX, a health research company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, today announced that it has raised $40 million in an oversubscribed series D funding round led by Merck’s Global Health Innovation Fund, with participation from new investors Mitsui, Itochu, and Itochu investment arm Technology Ventures, along with existing investors MPM Capital, F2 Ventures, and Deerfield Management. It brings TriNetX’s total raised to $102 million. The money will fuel its international expansion into Europe, Asia, and South America and help it further develop its AI and digital clinical trials technology.

The cash infusion comes as TriNetX notches revenue “well into” eight digits with 200 percent year-over-year growth, according to CEO Gadi Lachman. It currently supports electronic medical records and genomics analysis on over 300 million patients from “hundreds” of health care institutions in 17 countries, including the U.S., U.K., Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore, India, and Brazil, and it counts among its customer base pharma giants Novartis, Sanofi, Pfizer, and others.

“The landscape for clinical research is changing and TriNetX is leading the disruption as the industry transitions to leveraging data-driven insights to power clinical research and market surveillance,” said Lachman. “We’ve created the only real-world evidence ecosystem that brings data, analytics and a researcher community together, to aid in the design of randomized or pragmatic clinical trials and support of observational studies, whether retro- or prospective, controlled or longitudinal.”

Above: TriNetX’s web-based dashboard.

Image Credit: TriNetX

TriNetX — the brainchild of David Fusari, former principal architect of Microsoft’s healthcare solutions group — provides a trio of cloud-based, HIPAA- and GDPR-compliant subscription services aimed at simplifying the medical research process: TriNetX Research, TriNetX Download, and TriNetX Analyze. Together, they comprise a suite of trial design, cohort analysis, and site selection tools that enable users to query and download data from a claims database consisting of “billions” of aggregated clinical facts, including discharge summaries, labs, vitals, deep specialty information across therapeutic areas, and more.

Furthermore, TriNetX taps natural language processing (NLP) technology from German company Averbis to mine unstructured data from clinician notes for patients, which it subsequently maps to standardized clinical terminologies in order to fill in gaps in incomplete medical records. (Customers who opt to use it upload documents and their associated metadata to an onsite target directory on TriNetX appliance hardware.) That’s in addition to a recently launched algorithm that’s capable of sussing out chemotherapy patients’ line of treatment from patterns in tumor registries and pathology reports.

Ultimately, the goal is to lower the barriers to entry for clinical research. With TriNetX, researchers can perform tasks like tracking treatments patients are receiving to discover when (and why) they switched to new treatments, or applying custom statistical models to generate predictions without having direct access to clinical data.

“Real-world data is important when conducting clinical trials, drug research, and discovery today,” said Merck Global Health Innovation Fund vice president and managing director Joe Volpe. “TriNetX enables a global industry exchange and liberates data with the potential to rapidly provide answers to hard questions. With TriNetX, what previously took days or weeks to determine may often be done in minutes — that’s why we’re excited to participate in this financing round to grow and expand TriNetX’s offerings.”