Mark Daley Built the Last-Mile Machine Behind Clinical Trials

The distance between a promising drug and a useful answer is measured in people. Someone has to find participants who match a study’s narrow criteria. Someone has to explain the protocol without turning it into alphabet soup. Someone has to schedule visits, record data, answer questions, follow regulations and notice when one small inconsistency may become a large problem. Mark Daley built his company in that distance.

Daley is the founder and chief executive of Conquest Research, a clinical-trial site network headquartered in Winter Park, Florida. He did not arrive at the work from private equity or a corner office. His route began with biology at the University of Florida, followed by research administration inside the university’s Cancer and Genetics Research Complex and clinical research coordination in BioClinica Research’s neurology department. Before he managed a network, he worked where the protocol meets the calendar.

That distinction matters. Clinical research contains a peculiar split screen. On one side are pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology firms and contract research organizations designing studies that can run across countries. On the other are local clinics, investigators and participants. The protocol may be global. The appointment is always local. Conquest sits between them, turning a scientific plan into a sequence of real visits and accountable records.

An apprenticeship in the unglamorous work

Daley studied biology from 2011 to 2015. His early roles included a biochemistry teaching assistantship, university research coordination and work as a clinical research coordinator. These jobs share a useful property: they punish vagueness. A sample is labeled correctly or it is not. A visit lands inside the protocol window or it does not. A participant understands the consent process or the process has failed.

The future founder was learning a business through its smallest obligations. At the University of Florida complex in Gainesville, his work was tied to research administration. At BioClinica, he coordinated neurological studies. A 2020 academic paper on a long-running Alzheimer’s study lists him among the BioClinica Orlando study coordinators. It is not a glamorous line in a paper. It is closer to a receipt for time spent doing the work.

Conquest Research was incorporated in Florida in February 2018. Daley’s stated remit now includes the company’s clinical operations, business operations and growth strategy. Those three responsibilities are not easily separated. Recruiting participants too slowly is an operating problem, a customer problem and a growth problem at once. Growing too quickly without clean systems merely gives every flaw a larger audience.

“Our vision for the business will be accelerated alongside Reynolda’s experience in the clinical trials and broader pharma services space.”Mark Daley, 2023

The investment changed the map

In September 2023, Reynolda Equity Partners acquired a majority interest in Conquest. The deal put a clear expansion plan on paper: grow existing operations, establish new sites, place embedded research operations inside medical practices and selectively acquire other clinical sites. Daley described Reynolda as the partner for the company’s next phase. The founder remained CEO; the ambition acquired more capital.

This was not a plan to turn local clinical work into anonymous central processing. Trial sites depend on investigators with relevant expertise, communities willing to participate and teams capable of following a sponsor’s protocol precisely. A network can centralize systems, business development and oversight. It cannot manufacture local trust by memo.

The next moves reflected that constraint. In April 2025, Conquest acquired Sana Research, an operator in Northern Virginia. Sana brought locations in Arlington and Tyson’s Corner, a team led clinically by founder and principal investigator Dr. Henry Tran, and work across neurologic, cardiovascular and metabolic studies. Daley called the acquisition a strategic expansion into the Washington region and emphasized both geographic presence and shared therapeutic focus.

Then came Atlanta. Conquest acquired NeuroTrials Research in December 2025, with the transaction publicly announced the following January. NeuroTrials had been founded in 1997 and brought an established operation with particular experience in neurological and sleep-disorder studies. Its principal investigators remained in place. Again, the logic was not simply another pin on a map. Conquest added a local institution with history, specialized staff and relationships that could not be downloaded from headquarters.

When enrollment invites an inspection

One episode reveals the tension inside this model. Conquest said it enrolled roughly 20 percent of the participant population for one study. High enrollment led to the first FDA inspection in the company’s history. The company later reported that no Form 483 observations were issued and that the inspector recommended No Action Indicated. In plainer English: growth attracted a hard look, and the review did not identify conditions requiring formal observations.

Daley’s public reaction was four words: “Incredibly proud of this team…” The company’s longer post named staff members and tied the outcome to three goals: enrollment, participant safety and meaningful data. The punctuation is almost more revealing than a polished executive statement. Daley’s visible online presence is modest, and when he does post, he tends to point at teams, study milestones, acquisitions or industry gatherings.

That does not give us a private portrait, nor should it. It gives us a public operating style. Daley celebrates proof. He thanked the people attached to a clean inspection. He praised the team that helped a sponsor reach an enrollment milestone. At the 2025 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference, he appeared alongside Conquest medical director Dr. Malisa Agard, absorbing a field’s updates while the company was expanding its own capacity in neurological research.

The founder becomes the system designer

There is a recognizable progression in Daley’s career. First, learn the science. Then coordinate the study. Then create an organization for many studies. Finally, make the organization portable. Each step moves farther from the individual data point, but the business succeeds only if leadership remembers what that data point costs to produce.

Three systems hiding inside one site

Conquest’s public materials describe a business serving several constituencies at once. Sponsors and contract research organizations need enrollment, protocol compliance and dependable data. Physicians may want to make research available to their patients without assembling a department from scratch. Participants need plain explanations, predictable visits and a team they can reach. None of these groups experiences the same company, even when they enter through the same front door.

For an operator, that creates three linked systems. The first is a recruitment system: physician referrals, community outreach and advertising have to locate people who may fit a study. The second is a clinical system: trained staff screen, consent, schedule and monitor participants according to the protocol. The third is an information system: every visit must leave behind documentation that a sponsor can review and regulators can inspect. A weakness in any one of the three eventually becomes visible in the others.

This explains why Daley’s combination of clinical and operational responsibility is more than a broad job description. Recruitment cannot promise what the clinic cannot deliver. The clinic cannot improvise what the protocol does not allow. Growth cannot outrun the controls that make the resulting data credible. Conquest’s expansion thesis depends on joining those functions closely enough that a new or acquired location can enter the network without losing the local knowledge that made it useful.

The pattern is portable beyond research. When a business connects a complex institution to individual customers, the difficult advantage often lives in translation. Conquest translates study requirements into local workflows, and local participation into evidence a sponsor can use. The product may be described as site services. In practice, it is coordinated reliability across hundreds of small handoffs.

The word “platform” appears often in investment announcements because it makes a company sound pleasantly geometric. Clinical research refuses to stay geometric. A participant is late. A site needs another coordinator. A document does not reconcile. A promising recruitment channel reaches the wrong population. Building a platform here means creating routines strong enough to absorb ordinary human unpredictability without treating people as errors in a spreadsheet.

Daley’s aspiration, as expressed through Conquest’s announcements, is continued expansion: more locations, deeper therapeutic expertise and additional communities. The company says it continues to evaluate acquisitions. The interesting question is not whether the map can acquire more dots. It is whether the habits learned in Gainesville, Orlando and Winter Park can travel with them.

The answer will be found in decidedly uncinematic places: a coordinator’s checklist, an investigator’s judgment, a participant’s returned call, a monitor’s review. This is the last mile of drug development, except it repeats every day. Daley began close enough to see it. His company is a wager that the work can scale while the care stays local and the evidence stays clean.