A promising drug can survive chemistry, animal studies and a boardroom full of skeptical executives, only to encounter a remarkably ordinary obstacle: the right patient never walks through the clinic door. Clinical trials depend on people who fit narrow eligibility rules, understand the risks, consent, keep appointments and remain in the study long enough to produce useful data. That is the patch of ground Conquest Research chose to occupy.
Founded in 2018 by Mark Daley, the Winter Park, Florida, company runs clinical-trial sites for pharmaceutical companies, biotechs and contract research organizations. It is the local operating layer between a global protocol and a human being with knee pain, Alzheimer's disease, eczema, obesity or a sleep disorder. Conquest supplies investigators, coordinators, regulatory paperwork, patient monitoring, data collection and, crucially, recruitment.
The business sounds clinical because it is. It is also logistics, marketing and hospitality wearing a lab coat. Patients may return for repeated visits over months. Study sponsors need those visits performed consistently. A missed appointment can become missing data; a confusing consent process can become a dropout. Conquest's job is to keep the chain intact.
The product is a completed protocol
Conquest does not invent the molecule. A sponsor arrives with a study design and exacting rules: who qualifies, which tests happen when, what must be documented and how safety events are reported. The company turns that design into a functioning local operation. Its public study menu spans dermatology, gastrointestinal disease, metabolic disorders, neurology, orthopedics, rheumatology, psychiatry, sleep and other indications.
On one side are global drug developers and CROs, buyers that care about enrollment pace, protocol compliance and clean data. On the other are patients, who care whether the staff explains the study plainly, respects their time and makes the experience feel safe. Physician practices form a third channel: Conquest offers them a way to make trials available to existing patients without building an entire research department alone.
That two-sided tension is the company's real product. Sponsors want standardization. Patients want individual attention. Conquest promises both through centralized clinical and operational management paired with local investigators and community outreach. It recruits through physician referrals, multimedia advertising and events. One patient testimonial on its site even begins with the oddness of answering an Instagram ad for a herniated-disc study - then describes a year of punctual appointments and unhurried questions. It is a small anecdote that captures the funnel: a digital ad creates curiosity; the clinic has to earn trust.
The last-mile trial engine
What it costs - and who pays
The payer is generally the trial sponsor or its CRO, not the participant. Site contracts commonly compensate the operating site for protocol work such as screening, visits and data collection. Conquest says study-related care is provided to participants at no cost; some studies may compensate people for time and travel, depending on the protocol. Its individual sponsor agreements, revenue and margin are private.
The biggest disclosed corporate transaction is disclosed only halfway: in September 2023, Reynolda Equity Partners acquired a majority interest through a recapitalization. The purchase price and valuation were not announced. Reinsurance Group of America provided financing support. More important than the number was the plan attached to it - organic expansion, new locations, research operations embedded in medical practices and selective acquisitions of specialist sites.
“Our vision for the business will be accelerated alongside Reynolda's experience in the clinical trials and broader pharma services space.”Mark Daley, on the 2023 investment
The expansion was a map of capabilities
In April 2025, Conquest acquired Sana Research, a Northern Virginia operator focused on neurologic, cardiovascular and metabolic studies. Sana brought Arlington and Tyson's Corner into the network while its founder and principal investigator, Dr. Henry Tran, remained part of the clinical story. In December, Conquest added Atlanta-based NeuroTrials Research, founded in 1997 and known for neurological and sleep-disorder work.
These were not generic roll-ups. Both acquisitions widened geography and reinforced therapeutic areas Conquest already understood. NeuroTrials added depth in Alzheimer's disease, obstructive sleep apnea, insomnia and narcolepsy. Sana extended neurodegenerative and cardiometabolic coverage into the Washington, D.C., market. The current public location list shows three Florida sites - Winter Park, Lake Nona and Lake Mary - two in Virginia and one in Atlanta.
The chronology shows what changed after 2023. Before Reynolda's investment, Conquest described itself chiefly as an efficient Central Florida research provider and partner to local physician practices. The investment announcement made a broader playbook explicit: open sites, embed research teams inside established medical practices and acquire operators outside the region. Within two years, Sana and NeuroTrials supplied the first visible proof. Conquest had moved from adding capacity around Orlando to assembling a multi-state network with complementary investigators and patient pools.
One network, three regional patient pools
Scale matters because sponsors prefer fewer relationships and broader coverage. But research is stubbornly local. A national brand cannot manufacture a trusted neurologist, a community referral base or a population that matches a protocol overnight. Conquest's answer is to standardize operations while buying or building around local clinical expertise.
What failed first? Usually, recruitment
The first failure point Conquest repeatedly organizes around is the industry's: enrollment. Eligibility criteria can be narrow, patient awareness low and participation burdensome. The company's public language keeps returning to timely delivery, community outreach and results. Its recent LinkedIn updates celebrate enrollment rankings and first-patient milestones - operational trophies, not scientific claims.
Its Winter Park and Tyson's Corner teams recently reported the No. 1 and No. 6 enrollment rankings in a competitive obesity and Type 2 diabetes study. The flagship site also reported screening and enrolling the first U.S. patient in an osteoarthritis-of-the-knee study. Those posts reveal what customers reward: not vague innovation, but eligible people moving through a protocol on schedule.
The company's technology message is similarly practical. Conquest speaks about evolving technologies and e-solutions, but it does not present itself as a software vendor. Technology supports the process; it is not the process. The defensible asset is an operating system made of trained staff, investigators, referral relationships, patient databases, repeatable documentation and a reputation that gets people to return.
The useful bit founders can steal
A portable five-part playbook
- Choose a bottleneck customers already measure and pay to remove.
- Build local trust before trying to sell national scale.
- Standardize the invisible work - training, compliance, scheduling and data.
- Expand into adjacent markets that deepen the core capability.
- Use technology to tighten operations, not to decorate the pitch.
The clever part is the sequence. Conquest first developed a multi-therapeutic base in Central Florida, led clinically by Dr. Anand Patel, who has served as an investigator across pain, orthopedics, migraines, vaccines, rheumatologic disease, metabolic disorders and neurodegenerative conditions. Only then did outside capital arrive. The expansion plan did not require the company to abandon its original service; it made the same service denser and more geographically useful.
For another operator, the copyable lesson is not “buy clinics.” It is to separate what must remain local from what can be centralized. Investigator judgment, physician relationships and patient trust stay close to the site. Finance, business development, training standards, regulatory systems and sponsor relationships can travel across the network. That is how a service company can scale without pretending every market is identical.
It works when...
The service is measurable, local expertise matters, customers value fewer vendors and central operations genuinely reduce friction.
It breaks when...
Acquisitions dilute investigator quality, patient recruitment is treated like lead generation, or standardization becomes indifference to local communities.
The narrow bridge
Conquest occupies an unusually narrow bridge in health care. It cannot promise an investigational treatment will work. It cannot loosen eligibility rules to fill a study. It must protect patient safety while helping sponsors move quickly, and it must market studies without turning medicine into a sales promotion. The conditions for success are demanding: credible investigators, enough eligible patients nearby, strict protocol execution and sponsors with studies that match the network's therapeutic depth.
When those conditions are absent, the model loses leverage. A site in a thin patient market cannot outreach its way around biology. A protocol with punishing visit requirements may struggle no matter how friendly the coordinators are. A network that expands into unfamiliar indications can end up with overhead rather than expertise. And if local clinicians do not trust the operator, referrals dry up.
That restraint is why the company's acquisition choices matter. Conquest is not trying to be the laboratory, the drug company or the CRO all at once. It is building a specific piece of infrastructure: places where complex studies can meet real communities. The promise is not a breakthrough. The promise is that when a breakthrough needs proof, someone can find the patients, open the doors, follow the protocol and keep the appointments moving.