Metabolic

Topography Health is starting out of stealth with $27.5 million to enable practicing physicians to conduct clinical drug trials

What you should know:

– Topography Health, a clinical trials startup focused on general practitioners, was secretly founded today with $27.5 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Bain Capital Ventures.

– Co-founded by former Gerson Lehrman Group CEO Alexander Saint-Amand, Topography enables your GP to offer clinical drug trials as part of their practice. Not only for potentially fatal diseases, but also for moderate chronic diseases where the standard of care is lagging behind. Their goal is for your GP to be part of a national network of hundreds of thousands of community doctors who have the money, equipment, and staff to make local drug studies as accessible as a COVID test.

Why it matters

Barriers to entry into clinical trials are a chronic problem for Americans. Patients with intractable health conditions may qualify for existing drug trials, but in many cases are not screened or receive expanded biomarker testing. If patients gain access to state-of-the-art screening and are eligible for the study, they must afford the travel or relocation to study centers located in a handful of major metro areas. For patients with chronic health conditions such as fatty liver disease, the lack of available drug studies means that liver transplantation is the only treatment option (standard of care) when standard approaches such as weight loss and diet fail.

Potentially life-saving and life-enhancing therapeutics are also waiting years to enter clinical trials. 86% of study sites do not enroll the required patients and 50% never enroll a single patient. The study patient populations fall woefully short of a representative view of the American population.

“The lack of patient diversity in clinical trials is a major bottleneck in the drug development process, and Topography solves this by focusing on enabling physicians to efficiently incorporate clinical research and investigational capabilities into their core practice,” said Julie Yoo, General Partners, Andresen Horowitz. “As pharma and biotech funding boom, the demand for new researchers continues to outstrip supply, creating great opportunities to unleash new research capacity for physicians and their patients.”

Authorize resident physicians to conduct clinical drug trials

Emerging from 18 months in secret, Topography seeks to leverage the trust of patients and physicians on the ground to break down historical barriers to drug trial participation, solve supply and demand challenges in drug development, and bring exponentially more therapeutics to the market bring to market. Topography is a complete, white-glove clinical trial product and service experience that identifies, trains, and supports community physicians in expanding their clinical research capabilities and scaling clinical trials in their communities.

Topography reduces the administrative and operational burden placed on physicians, helping physician practices better understand their patient populations, recommending which studies have high likelihood of acceptance and impact, recruiting patients, and hiring, managing, and supporting research staff. Topography’s digital workflow technology enables physicians to reduce friction and manage all clinical data in one place. Its data science platform analyzes patient records to help physicians in diverse communities recommend and personalize research for their patients, many of which may have been excluded from or missed by promising drug trials in the past.

Availability

Topography is currently in beta with several practicing physicians, with an initial focus on metabolic diseases. It actively recruits community physicians nationally to apply for the investigator role.

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