Self-described anti-clinical research organisation (CRO) Lindus Health has received $55m in Series B funding to back its fully integrated, AI-driven alternative research services.
The UK-based startup launched four years ago to correct many of the shortfalls of other CROs by bringing all processes in-house and setting a single price for sponsors.
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The funding round was led by new investor Balderton Capital, with support from Visionaries Club and existing investors Creandum, Firstminute, and Seedcamp. Lindus previously raised $18m in a 2023 funding round that featured participation from controversial American political figure, Peter Thiel.
Speaking with Clinical Trials Arena, Lindus Health co-founder Meri Beckwith detailed how the company was formed in response to frustration with typical CROs, particularly due to some of their practices around payments and delays.
Beckwith said: “Like a normal CRO, we have all the services you would expect around clinical operations, project management, and medical monitoring. However, regarding the anti-CRO aspect of our company, there are really two big differences between us and traditional CROs. Everything we do is completely fixed-fee and milestone-based. When a sponsor gives us a clinical trial protocol, we’ll give them a completely fixed table of our costs. So, there’s no hourly billing.
“I founded the company because I became incredibly frustrated at being billed by the hour by our CROs, who frankly didn’t care whether a trial was late, whether their patients were experiencing problems, or whether there were issues with the data being collected.
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By GlobalData“I felt that was deeply unfair and frankly unethical. So, it was really important that we did something different here.”
In its short lifetime, the startup CRO has so far worked with 80 clinical trials across the US, UK and Europe, as well as plans to launch trials in indications such as menopause, tinnitus, insomnia, and childhood myopia.
Admonishing how typical CROs are liable to let patients down, Beckwith added: “I started the company after my own experiences as a patient in clinical trials, and these were big Phase III trials.
“One of the things I was most shocked about was that it was very hard to take part in the trial as a patient. There was no compensation for travel, they kept calling us into a hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic to fill out paper forms, and no one could tell me why we couldn’t just do this online. It’s just about employing common sense.”
Beckwith echoed some of the same concerns raised by CROs themselves, as well as trial participants at the Munich Clinical Trials in Oncology conference, where patient advocates urged trial runners to take the wellbeing and convenience of unwell participants seriously. On the CRO side, the industry is looking at several challenges in 2025, with shifts in the global political and regulatory landscapes.
