Caetum, a Halifax company that emerged from St. Mary’s University’s graduate program for startups, is preparing to launch an online product next year aimed at solving a huge pain for clinical researchers.
The company is producing a digital platform that helps clinical research sites budget for their projects, something that can be a surprisingly large challenge.
Though there is software on the market that helps with such tasks, it is expensive and includes lots of features that researchers don’t need, said co-founder Mandy Woodland in an interview.
The three founders of Ceatum — the others declined to be named — attended the first cohort of the Master’s of Technology, Entrepreneurship and Innovation program at the Halifax university.
The founders, all of whom have experience in a range of fields, entered the program in the autumn of 2013 and worked on a few ideas until they learned of the problems plaguing clinical researchers.
When they began to interview researchers, they were astonished by what they heard.
“I was shocked, shocked, shocked,” said Woodland, a lawyer from St. John’s, N.L.
“Every single person we talked to said they used pencil and paper, or they made up their own Microsoft Excel spreadsheets (to do their budgeting).”
A former biological researcher, Woodland explained that the budget process for medical research is complicated.
For example, some medicines may need to be tested on a certain number of people to complete the clinical trial, but some patients may drop out during the course of the test.
There are also varying costs for procedures like MRIs and CT scans or nurse visits, so it’s difficult to estimate at the outset what the final costs will be.
Caetum is developing software that will be flexible and easy enough to use that it will save researchers time doing budgeting.
The flexibility will allow them to alter the tabulations to reflect changes as tests progress.
The software package will also aim to provide data on the costs in specific research sites or geographic locations.
This would help to address the problem research institutions have negotiating with the sponsors of their research.
Researchers may budget a certain amount for a clinical procedure, but the sponsors frequently argue that the estimates are too high.
By providing data on the costs in different locations, Caetum will give research institutes more negotiating power.
For the last six months, Woodland and her co-founders interviewed representatives of 65 research sites and have signed up five to undergo tests with the new product starting in April.
They’ve also hired two people.
The trio has not raised any external financing and intends to grow the company through revenue rather than investment.
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