• Health Tech

How Investing in New Technologies is Changing Clinical Trial and Laboratory Work

January 20, 2023

Innovation in drug development depends on clinical trials, but the way data from these studies is captured and communicated has yet to keep pace with technological advances. YonaLink’s founders recognized a need for better software to share and streamline the exchange of clinical trial data, so they built solutions that address this gap within the healthcare industry.

YonaLink’s CEO, Iddo Peleg, announced that the company had received a $ 6 million round of funding from the Debiopharm Innovation Fund to accelerate its efforts in making clinical trials more efficient and bringing new treatments to patients faster.

Even though clinical trials have progressed over time and are now conducted almost entirely via digital means, there will always be room for human input—including oversight. Peleg points to collecting and streaming data from participants at trial sites as one of the most significant disadvantages.

Peleg says their process still involves a lot of manual work. Trial sites monitor patients participating in a research program and enter their data into an electronic health record (EHR) for storage before transferring it to the trial’s electronic data capture (EDC)—all done manually.

Medical centers wishing to share clinical trial data with their researchers must manually transfer the information from their electronic health records (EHR) into electronic databases explicitly created for research purposes. The EDC can handle large amounts of data, but entering so much information by hand takes a long time and is prone to human error.

YonaLink – co-founded by Iddo Peleg, Gav Martell, Itai Rechnitz and Gil Meir — offers a technology system to simplify the process of clinical data collection.

The company aims to improve the speed, quality, and interoperability of clinical trials by eliminating analog workstreams. “Accurate data streaming is the key to bringing therapies to market faster than ever before,” Peleg says.

YonaLink offers a scalable way to bridge data gaps globally, which could help improve the efficiency of clinical trials and speed up research.

“On many different levels, we enable easy integration and connection to solve interoperability problems,” Martell says.

In today’s world of fast-paced, ever-changing healthcare, trial managers need to be able to access data in real-time. And that is precisely what Peleg and his team aim to create—a solution enabling companies and researchers to yield insights into research faster than ever before.

Investing in research to improve medical trials.

YonaLink, whose infusion of capital was led by the Debiopharm Innovation Fund and eHealth Ventures, and the European Union – both participants in this round – aims to expand its impact on global clinical trials.

“We currently focus on Israel, the United States, and Spain,” says Peleg. “But we’ll use this funding to expand our network—so that people in more countries can easily find clinical trials they want to participate in.”

The clinical trials landscape is set to change.

Within the next five years, real-time data streaming and EHR integration will be the new standard for clinical trials.

“When I started working in clinical trials, people were just moving from paper documentation to EDCs,” Peleg says. “Within a few years, no one will want to copy data anymore; they’ll move to stream.”

Martell and Peleg are working together to transform how clinical trials are conducted.