Reify Health has announced a $220M Series D funding round, bringing the company’s valuation to over $4.8 billion.
The financing will support its efforts to improve diversity and representation in clinical trial participation.
Some minority communities have been significantly under-represented in clinical trials, which presents potential health issues.
Treatments can work differently among people of different ethnicities, and this is not often reflected during the clinical trials stage.
Over the last several years, key stakeholders that include the FDA, biopharmaceutical companies, medical research institutions, and non-profit organisations have initiated efforts to increase diversity in clinical trial participation.
Ralph Passarella, CEO of Reify Health, said:
“As we looked at what needs to be done to bring representation and inclusion to clinical trials, we reached two conclusions.
“First, while we all want a quick solution, this is a complex, multi-layered problem that will require significant resource commitments over the next decade to achieve meaningful, long-lasting improvements.
“Second, we recognised that we are uniquely positioned to do work that can make an impact on this problem through our two businesses, Care Access and StudyTeam.
“We see what needs to be done and have a way to contribute, so we have the responsibility to act.”
Reify Health is launching BRIDGE (Bringing Representation, Inclusion, and Diversity to Global Enrollment), an initiative aimed at devoting the company’s capabilities in partnership with like-minded organisations to achieve two primary objectives:
- Build a robust understanding, both qualitative and quantitative, of the barriers to underrepresented minority groups participating in clinical trials.
- Deliver solutions that overcome these barriers, so clinical trials are more representative of the patient populations they aim to treat.
Through BRIDGE, Reify and its partners will make commitments to achieve specific goals over the next ten years.
“Our announcement today about capital investment and long-term commitment speaks to the size of the challenge ahead to make clinical trials more representative,” said Michael Lin, Executive Chair of Reify Health.
“When we celebrated the ten-year anniversary of our company in March of 2022, the message to our team and partners was: ‘The last ten years have been about building a foundation, and the next ten years are about making an impact at scale.’
“BRIDGE represents the magnitude of impact we aim to make in life sciences in our next decade.”
