Hoboken, New Jersey: September 2, 2020: Castor, a leading provider of clinical trial technology that automates the research process, today announced its partnership with Click Therapeutics, a leader in the field of digital therapeutics, to provide solutions for conducting fully remote clinical trials.
Click Therapeutics develops and commercializes software as prescription medical treatments for patients with unmet medical needs. Click’s first marketed product, a digital program for smoking cessation is available to consumers through a variety of payers, providers, and employers. The company is also progressing a pipeline of prescription digital treatments across multiple indications, including for the treatment of depression, insomnia, acute coronary syndrome, migraine, overactive bladder, chronic low back pain, and obesity.
Castor will provide Click with solutions for digital enrollment, electronic consent (eConsent), and remote data capture (EDC and eCOA). By supporting a decentralized approach to research, the companies expect to reduce traditional trial duration and costs by at least 30 percent compared to conventional trial methods.
Spearheading the partnership, Castor CEO Derk Arts, MD, PhD, said, “I’m particularly excited about this opportunity because digital therapeutics are a key growth area for the industry. This, combined with the fully remote approach for Click’s clinical trials adds to my excitement, because supporting research that puts minimal strain on participants and investigators has always been a priority for Castor. We will accomplish this by allowing patients to enroll and consent into this study from anywhere in the United States, and capturing data on their progress remotely. It’s truly amazing to be able to support such a forward thinking company as Click Therapeutics.”
According to Cathleen Platt, Click’s Vice President of Clinical Development, “When selecting a partner for these upcoming trials, we compared traditional providers in the space with some of the newer companies. After an extensive RFP process, we determined that Castor was a forward-thinking, cost-effective provider who could deliver all required components, including EDC. As pioneers in our field, we needed a partner that has a clear vision for the industry and is as interested as we are in transforming how therapies are developed and delivered.”
Since February, Castor has prioritized supporting COVID-19 trials and developing decentralized clinical trial technology to enable vital research during the pandemic. Decentralized and hybrid clinical trials require fewer clinic visits and reduce the burden on patients and caregivers. Castor’s new video-enabled enrollment and eConsent platform can be combined with traditional eClinical components, such as EDC and ePRO, to allow investigators and participants to decide how and where they contribute to research. Castor’s partnership with Click will advance their common goal of making the clinical trial process more impactful, efficient, and patient-centric.
About Castor
Based in the United States and The Netherlands, Castor is an international health-tech company founded by CEO Derk Arts, MD, PhD. Their cloud-based clinical data platform simplifies the clinical trial process, from recruitment to analysis, for researchers worldwide.
More than 50,000 researchers across 90 countries are using Castor to supercharge their research. Castor’s platform has supported more than 4,000 commercial and academic studies that cover a broad range of therapeutic areas including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, rare diseases, infectious diseases, and oncology. Researchers on the platform generate vast amounts of data from traditional and remote trials, and Castor recently reached milestones of 180,000,000 data points and 2,000,000 enrolled patients. Castor’s goal is to make the world’s research data reusable, enabling AI-driven clinical trials, and ultimately creating a future in which they maximize the impact of data through reuse.
In 2020, Castor raised a $12M Series A from Two Sigma Ventures with participation from Hambrecht Ducera Growth Ventures and existing investor INKEF Capital. Castor previously raised a $6.25M seed round from INKEF Capital in 2018.