Lindus Health is speeding up new treatments by helping companies streamline clinical trials
PayPal and Palantir founder Peter Thiel has beomce an investor in London-based Healthtech Lindus Health, which is building a platform to plan, monitor and analyse clinical trials for health and biotech companies.
Sifted understands that the German-American billionaire chipped in around $1m in December 2022, joining previous investors Firstminute, Presight, Seedcamp and Hambro Perks. Despite a slowdown in overall tech investment over the past year, Thiel has continued to make bets in Europe.
Thiel’s fresh investment, along with a recent Innovate UK Smart grant of £437K and a $5 seed round raised by the start up in November 2021, is being used to grow the startup’s commercial team and encourage growth in the US.
What does Lindus Health do?
Clinical trials are one of the biggest contributors to the lengthy process of bringing a new treatment or drug to market. Lindus Health wants to accelerate trials by executing and monitoring every stage of them on a single platform.
The startup was founded by Meri Beckwith, Nik Haldimann and Michael Young in 2021. Young was the life sciences adviser to the UK government during Boris Johnson’s term as prime minister.
Its platform manages all parts of planning and running a clinical trial for health and biotech companies developing new treatments, from sourcing patients with social media campaigns and screening candidates using electronic health records to offering a dashboard to monitor trial progress and machine learning models to suggest improvements based on data from over 600k previous trials.
Companies pay Lindus Health to operate and deliver the clinical trial and resulting data, and pricing varies depending on the needs of each client – it can go from hundreds of thousands of pounds to millions or even tens of millions for more complex trials, such as Covid vaccines.
So far, the platform has been used in over 80 trials: partnerships have included Berlin startup Dopavision which is developing a treatment for childhood short-sightedness, the UK’s Pharmanovia which is working to cure insomnia and tinnitus treatment developer Oto, also based in London.
Peter Thiel sticks with Europe
Lindus Health marks the latest in a string of European investments made by the prolific founder-turned-investor Thiel. Last year, he closed more deals than in 2021, a relatively rare increase compared to the rest of the industry.
And though the healthtech sector hasn’t been immune from the downturn – 2022 investment in Europe dropped by 34% compared to 2021 – there are signs of potential recovery. European Healthtech’s have raised around $51.4m so far according to Dealroom in Q2, already a marked improvement compared to the second quarter of 2022 which saw just $17.1m raised.