decentralized-clinical-trials
(21)
John Reites Learned Clinical Research from the Inside Out
He began as a self-described paper pusher, questioned the machinery from every seat he occupied, and built a career around making clinical research easier to enter and harder to abandon.
THREAD Moved the Clinical Trial to the Patient's Kitchen Table
For decades a clinical trial meant a patient driving to a site. THREAD bet the visit could come to them instead - and then bought four companies to prove it.
Respiree
Respiree is a Singapore-founded digital health company (an A*STAR spin-off) building clinically validated AI that pairs FDA-cleared cardio-respiratory wearable sensors with software to track lung and heart biomarkers over time. Its 1Bio platform helps hospitals, health systems and biopharma detect patient deterioration - such as COPD flare-ups and heart failure - days in advance, powering remote patient monitoring, clinical decision support and decentralized clinical trials across Asia-Pacific, Australia and the United States.
Castor
Castor is a health-technology company that builds a cloud-based eClinical platform for running clinical trials - from electronic data capture (EDC) and eConsent to eCOA/ePRO and real-world evidence. Founded in 2012 in Amsterdam by physician-researcher Dr. Derk Arts, Castor set out to replace clunky, expensive trial software with a self-service, researcher-friendly system. Today it supports more than 15,000 studies across 90+ countries and is used by leading CROs and biopharma companies, while pushing decentralized trials and practical AI (Castor Catalyst, built with Google Cloud) into mainstream research.
Embleema
Embleema is a New York- and France-based healthcare technology company that builds a unified real-world data and evidence platform for clinical research. It aggregates clinical, genomic, and patient-reported data from electronic medical records, wearables, biospecimens, and patient apps into regulatory-grade datasets, and uses no-code protocol tools plus dynamic consent to help pharmaceutical sponsors, research sites, and patient groups run non-interventional and Phase IV studies faster and at lower cost. Founded in 2017 by Robert Chu, the company started with a patient-driven health blockchain and its analytics stack has been used by the FDA for genomic regulatory review.
Huma
Huma is a London-based digital health technology company that builds a regulated, modular software platform used by hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and governments to run remote patient monitoring, 'hospital at home', companion apps and decentralized clinical trials. Founded in 2011 as Medopad and rebranded to Huma in 2020, it combines predictive algorithms, digital biomarkers and real-world data with a no-code Huma Cloud Platform so partners can launch regulated, disease- and device-agnostic health apps. Its Software as a Medical Device holds EU MDR Class IIb, US FDA Class II and UK MHRA registrations, and its technology has reached thousands of hospitals and tens of millions of patients worldwide.
Derk Arts
Derk Arts is a Dutch physician-turned-entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Castor, a clinical-trial software company he started in 2012 after coding the first version of its Electronic Data Capture platform himself. Trained as a medical doctor and epidemiologist with a PhD, he built Castor to make clinical research more inclusive, patient-centric, and data-driven. The platform now supports thousands of trials across roughly 90 countries and was used by the World Health Organization for its Solidarity Trial. Castor has raised more than $60 million, including a $45 million Series B in 2021, and Arts is a recognized voice on decentralized trials, eConsent, and the responsible use of AI in research.
Shayan Khorassani
Shayan Khorassani is the Field CEO at Huma, the London-based AI health infrastructure company powering regulated digital health applications for pharma, providers, and governments across 70+ countries. A licensed architect turned health technology operator, he moved from designing physical structures at Tom Wiscombe Architecture and SCI-Arc to translating Huma's platform into deployments for global health systems.
Mural Health
Mural Health is a Berwyn, Pennsylvania-based clinical research technology company whose Mural Link platform is billed as the industry's first participant management system. It combines patient payments, travel and rideshare booking, two-way messaging, and real-time experience feedback into one participant-first tool aimed at helping people enroll in and stay in clinical trials while easing the administrative burden on research sites and sponsors. Founded in 2022 by Sam Whitaker - the inventor of the original ClinCard payment technology at Greenphire - the company positions itself against legacy prepaid-card systems, notably by eliminating the inactivity fees that quietly drain participant balances.
People Science
People Science is a Los Angeles clinical research organization that turns rigorous clinical trials into software. Its platform, Chloe, lets wellness and health brands design, launch, and run decentralized, IRB-approved studies entirely from participants' homes - integrating wearables, lab partners, and remote data collection so that supplements, nutraceuticals, cannabinoids, psychedelics, and food-as-medicine products can earn real clinical evidence at a fraction of the cost and time of a traditional CRO. Founded by MD-PhD co-CEOs Belinda Tan and Noah Craft, who previously built Science 37 into a billion-dollar clinical trials company, People Science aims to bring evidence to an industry long defined by claims.
Belinda Tan
Belinda Tan is a physician-scientist turned serial founder who builds the missing evidence layer for wellness. An MIT-trained, UCLA MD/PhD dermatopathologist, she co-founded Science 37 to pioneer decentralized, telemedicine-enabled clinical trials, then launched People Science, a Los Angeles public-benefit company she co-leads with her husband Noah Craft. Her mission: bring the rigor of the randomized trial to the things people already use - probiotics, traditional Chinese medicine, food-as-medicine, psychedelics - so wellness can be backed by data instead of marketing.
Samuel Whitaker
Samuel Whitaker is the founder and CEO of Mural Health, a Philadelphia-area clinical trials technology company building a participant-first platform that bundles fee-free payments, transportation, two-way communication, and real-time satisfaction data. He invented the original participant payment tool, the ClinCard, when he founded Greenphire in 2008 and grew it into a billion-dollar company on roughly $2.2 million of outside capital. After a stint as CTO of Signant Health, he launched Mural Health in 2022 to push the same idea further: treating the trial participant, not just the sponsor, as the customer. He also drove the creation of the Harley Jacobsen Act, federal legislation to stop taxing payments to clinical trial participants.
Curebase
Curebase is a San Francisco-based eClinical software company building an AI-powered platform that runs clinical trials around patients' lives instead of inside hospital walls. Its single system spans study startup to database lock - combining electronic data capture (EDC), eConsent, ePRO/eCOA, patient recruitment, and a virtual research site model - so sponsors can launch decentralized and hybrid trials faster, capture cleaner data, and reach more diverse participant populations.
Curavit Clinical Research
Curavit Clinical Research is a Boston-based, all-virtual Contract Research Organization (CRO) that designs and runs decentralized clinical trials. Through its Virtual Clinical Site and STRATUS platform, Curavit recruits, enrolls, and monitors diverse patient populations remotely - eliminating physical site infrastructure and travel while improving data quality. The company specializes in trials for digital therapeutics (DTx) and partners with sponsors and existing CROs to fix the execution layer of clinical research, accelerating timelines and lowering costs.
Joel Morse
Joel Morse is the co-founder and CEO of Curavit Clinical Research, a virtual contract research organization (VCRO) that designs and runs decentralized clinical trials for digital therapeutics, devices and drugs. A mechanical engineer turned serial healthcare operator, he previously co-founded C3i Solutions in 1993 and built it into a global leader in tech-enabled clinical trial services before selling to Telerx in 2014. At Curavit he is betting that trials can be run where patients actually live, stitching together wearables, web recruitment and real-world evidence to reach people traditional sites never see.
Medidata Solutions
Medidata Solutions is a New York-based, cloud software company that runs the digital plumbing of modern clinical research. Its flagship Rave EDC pioneered electronic data capture in clinical trials, and today its unified platform spans data capture, patient engagement, AI analytics, imaging, and trial operations. A Dassault Systèmes company since 2019, Medidata powers trials for most of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies and has supported the development of a large share of newly approved drugs and medical devices.
Hawthorne Health
Hawthorne Health is a clinical trials company that decentralizes research by sending GCP-trained medical professionals - called Hawthorne Heroes - directly into patients' homes, pharmacies, and community settings. Founded in 2015 by former Edwards Lifesciences executive Jodi Akin, the company operates the largest mobile nurse network in clinical research, covering 50+ states and territories, with access to over 1,000 community-based locations. Their technology platform and distributed workforce model have completed 76+ trials with a 99% visit completion rate while achieving patient diversity metrics 3-10x above industry standards.
Medable
Medable is a Palo Alto-based digital health company building a cloud SaaS platform for decentralized and hybrid clinical trials. Its tools - eCOA+, Total Consent, Sensors, and Televisit - let pharma sponsors and CROs run studies remotely, enrolling patients in over 60 countries and 120+ languages.
Josh Rose
Josh Rose is the CEO of Hawthorne Health, Inc. (formerly Hawthorne Effect), a Walnut Creek-based company building the largest community-based clinical trial site network in the U.S. A clinical research industry veteran with over 20 years of experience, Rose previously led decentralized clinical trial strategy at IQVIA and CVS Health before taking the helm at Hawthorne Health in early 2024. Under his leadership, Hawthorne has expanded to 75+ community locations, partnered with 40+ pharma sponsors, and pioneered a model that embeds certified clinical research staff inside independent pharmacies and patients' homes - bringing trials to communities that traditional research networks have long bypassed.
Michelle Longmire
Dr. Michelle Longmire is the co-founder and CEO of Medable, the leading platform for agentic AI in clinical development. A Stanford-trained physician-scientist who grew up in a Los Alamos nuclear-research family, she pivoted from dermatology to founding Medable in 2015 after hitting enrollment walls in her own clinical research. Under her leadership, Medable has raised over $500 million in venture capital, deployed its platform in roughly 400 trials across 70 countries in 120 languages, and served more than one million patients globally - transforming how the world runs clinical trials.
Tom Lemberg
Tom Lemberg is the Founder & CEO of Curebase, a San Francisco-based decentralized clinical trial platform that has enrolled over 60,000 patients across 60+ studies. A Harvard-trained computer scientist and molecular biologist, Lemberg built Curebase from his couch in 2017, joined Y Combinator in 2018, and raised $59M to transform how clinical trials work - letting patients participate from home and bringing their own doctors into the research process. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2022, he's on a mission to make clinical trials accessible to any patient, anywhere.