Medidata, a New York City-based company that offers cloud storage and data analytics services for clinical trials, announced last week its plans to acquire Mytrus, a clinical trial technology company focused on patient-focused electronic informed consent and remote trials. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
“The informed consent process is one of the most important parts of running both ethical and effective research projects. It's also the first step in giving patients a 21st Century experience, helping the critical elements of patient enrollment and retention in projects advancing healthcare," Medidata President Glen de Vries said in a statement. “Adding eConsent to the Medidata platform reinforces our commitment to improving patient engagement by delivering better tools, more data and higher quality insights for patients and researchers.”
Medidata will roll up Mytrus's main product, Enroll, into its existing Patient Cloud of patient-facing services. It will add capabilities that allow trial organizers to educate patients about the clinical trial experience with multimedia and interactive content; help site investigators to better understand patient questions and open up dialogue with patients; and increase patient retention and compliance by improving remote tracking of consent, document management, and version control.
Those features will be added to existing components of Patient cloud: AppConnect, which helps sponsors collect subjective patient data through electornic clinical outcome assessments; SensorLink, which helps gather objective patient data from wearables and sensors, and ePRO, which facilitates patient-reported outcomes.
“Patients are the cornerstone of clinical research and they have the right to simple and convenient access to study information,” Mytrus CEO Anthony Costello said in a statement. “Our goal at Mytrus has always been to build technology that enables patients to be more connected to research. Together with Medidata, we will be able to quickly advance this mission and extend the reach of our products to more patients, on more studies, in more countries.”
Both Mytrus and Medidata have long histories in mobile-enabled clinical trials. Mytrus was one of the vendors in Pfizer's groundbreaking (if ultimately abortive) 2011 attempt at the first fully remote clinical trial. Medidata, meanwhile, has been active in the space since 1999 and has worked on connected trials with groups like GlaxoSmithKline and Memorial Sloan Kettering.
