Decentralized clinical trial company THREAD announced Tuesday it has acquired CureClick, a platform for recruiting trial participants.

The latest deal is THREAD's third acquisition announcement in less than six months. In January, the company said it had scooped up inVibe, which aims to use patient voice data for research. THREAD also acquired Modus Outcomes, a research design consultancy, in November. 

CureClick offers a platform for ambassadors representing different diseases or conditions to find open clinical trials and share information about how to join on social media.

"One of the advantages of decentralization is engaging patients from broader geographic areas and more diverse backgrounds into clinical research so that trials better represent real-world populations," John Reites, CEO of THREAD, said in a statement.

"CureClick helps our customers make their clinical trials more accessible and inclusive while better supporting our existing base of premier recruitment-focused partners who can leverage a new marketplace for their services."

WHY IT MATTERS

THREAD is positioning the acquisition as a way to more easily enroll participants in decentralized clinical trials.

"Integrating CureClick's technology in the THREAD platform means a participant can quickly and easily go from being totally unaware of a potentially life-altering clinical trial to being enrolled and participating in that trial," Nico Coetzee, chief marketing officer at CureClick, said in a statement. Coetzee will serve as head of recruitment for THREAD. "This is a powerful step forward to modernizing research."

THE LARGER TREND

Like other virtual care tools, decentralized clinical trials became more mainstream during the COVID-19 pandemic as researchers and trial participants aimed to limit in-person interaction.

"This discussion became very operational, very tactical. How do you do this? What are the benefits? How do I put it into the studies I have today?" THREAD's Reites said on HIMSSCast last year. "The pandemic accelerated that thought process. It also presented a really active requirement and need for decentralized studies."

Another decentralized clinical trial platform, Medable, raised a whopping $304 million Series D investment in October last year. Lightship also announced a $40 million funding round around the same time. 

DCT company Science 37 went public in 2021 through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company. Meanwhile Verily, Alphabet's life science subsidiary, acquired clinical trial management company SignalPath last year to further build out Baseline, its clinical trial platform that includes technology for decentralized and hybrid trials.