Bolt cofounder Ryan Breslow is launching a health-tech startup to take on big pharma and decentralize clinical trials
The startup raised a $7.5 million seed round from investors including Human Capital.
Decentralization is a key component of fintech that Ryan Breslow hopes to apply to the health-tech industry with his new firm. He recently received $7.5 million to realise his vision of "people-powered pharma."
Love, a health tech business that democratises which medical therapies enter clinical trials, secured $7.5 million in venture funding from Human Capital and MaC Venture Capital at a $180 million valuation.
Love is introducing a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) that enables people to exchange accounts of various treatments that have assisted in resolving their medical problems. A clinical trial to gather information on how well particular therapies actually work can be crowdfunded if enough people vote in favour of it.
The concept aims to upend the conventional clinical research procedure, which, according to Breslow, promotes big pharma profit over effective treatments.
All of its users will be able to discuss the treatments that have worked for them through its DAO, which will go live in December. The community will then vote on the treatments they wish to see supported in a clinical study. The firm will initially concentrate on long-term COVID symptoms, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and substance use problems, but it will also consider what customers care about.
Decentralization, which has been popular in the fintech sector for some time, is beginning to catch on in the health tech sector, particularly when it comes to at-home clinical trials. Swift Medical, a digital wound-care business, announced last year that it will develop technology to assist these decentralised trials, which have become more and more popular since the COVID-19 outbreak.