Verily to Acquire SignalPath, Expanding Company’s Clinical Research Capabilities

Verily, an Alphabet company, and SignalPath today announced that they have entered into an agreement in which Verily will acquire SignalPath, a privately held company based in Raleigh that has developed the SignalPath platform, a clinical trial management system (CTMS) that improves the ease, quality and efficiency of conducting clinical research at study sites.

“Joining forces helps to accelerate and scale our shared vision, increase efficiency and lower costs in clinical trials, empower clinical research sites with world class technology, and ultimately bring medicines to patients faster,” said Amy Abernethy, MD, PhD, President of Clinical Studies Platforms at Verily. “It’s our goal to modernize the way clinical trials are conducted for patients, researchers and sponsors alike. Together, we will advance digital solutions to improve ease, quality, efficiency and speed in the current clinical trial paradigm.”

The acquisition will strengthen and expand Verily’s existing clinical trial system and evidence generation platform, known as Baseline. The Baseline platform enables better and faster clinical trial execution, improved data aggregation and analysis, flexible study options designed for decentralized and hybrid trials, and the ability to capture real-world data, such as that generated by novel sensors and biomarkers. In addition, the Baseline community now numbers more than 500,000 individuals who are interested in participating in clinical research and automatically matched with research opportunities that meet their interests and profiles.

SignalPath was founded in 2014 with a similar goal to change the way that clinical research is conducted, and a specific focus on building state-of-the-art software to improve efficiency for clinical research sites. SignalPath’s platform reduces fragmentation by leveraging a modern software architecture with a cloud-based platform in order to optimize management of a study site’s clinical trials portfolio. SignalPath’s robust technology infrastructure offers novel approaches to partners that can dramatically improve the costs, complexities and time associated with clinical trials. By joining with Verily, SignalPath will be able to provide clinical research sites access to a quickly growing portfolio of resources, tools and trial opportunities that further strengthen its value proposition.

“At SignalPath, we’ve created a better research ecosystem – one that combines a network of premier, technology-enabled research sites with a best in class suite of clinical trial tools to address the pain points experienced by patients, sites and sponsors,” said Brad Hirsch, MD, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of SignalPath. “Combining these capabilities with Verily’s clinical studies platforms business accelerates our ability to scale these solutions and make them available to a larger group of sites as well as provide entirely new opportunities to our network. It is another step forward in accelerating clinical research and helping get treatments to market faster.”

“We are focused on the future of site-based, hybrid and decentralized clinical studies to accelerate evidence generation including drug and device development in a variety of formats that will make clinical research more accessible,” Dr. Abernethy continued. “Through our combined efforts, we hope to help bring medicines to patients more quickly, involve a larger community of people in the process by making participation in clinical research easier, and set a new standard for clinical studies and evidence generation.”

Dr. Abernethy joined Verily in June to lead Verily’s planned expansion into a full-scale clinical evidence generation platform supporting a broad range of clinical trials and real-world evidence (RWE) studies. She was most recently Principal Deputy Commissioner of Food and Drugs of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the agency’s acting Chief Information Officer. Dr. Abernethy is credited with having catalyzed enduring changes in the way the FDA uses data as well as advancing FDA’s work in RWE and personalized medicine.

SignalPath employees will join Verily as part of Verily’s clinical research business at the time of closing. They will maintain their physical presence in Raleigh, increasing Verily’s geographic footprint with this new location in North Carolina.