TrialBee: Accelerating Clinical Trials And Leveraging A Profitable Pharma Sector
The Pharmaceutical industry is massive globally with huge funds for Research and Development alone. It is estimated that the spending on the clinical trials alone account for 40% of the budget allocated to R&D, which is an equally essential organ of any pharmaceutical company. The major issue regarding this is therefore finding volunteers for the clinical trials and is a cause of delay in drug development. Trialbee has come up with a solution for the same problem. The idea is to reduce the issues associated to finding the right volunteers using the Trialbee platform.
What makes Trialbee important is the fact that it addresses an unexplored market that has a demand in both the drug manufacturing as well as health care system. For example the pharma industry currently needs over 23 500 000 candidates to join over 10 000 studies globally. The financial burden associated to delays is huge, with one month of delay translating to $1 Million with overall loss in sales amounts to $15 to $200 Million. This of course varies for different drugs.
Illtags Takes The Fight Against The Flu Online
Illtags, a Finnish startup that also took part in Slush event, aims to keep us a bit more healthy by letting us broadcast how we feel online. The service is founded by two young guns, a developer and a doctor, that I would call social entrepreneurs.
Illtags aims to combine two things for its analysis: 1) Tags depicting symptoms inputted at Facebook, Twitter or illtags.com and 2) Places, events and groups where users might catch or spread a bug. The strength of this approach is that all of this information already exists in social networks. By combining these two elements Illtags aims to analyze how diseases are spreading across social networks at an individual level, and let us avoid the places where the flu has taken over.
The service has a website, but just as with Dopplr that was acquired by Nokia, with Illtags you don't really have to visit their website as they aim to integrate deeply into other platforms. Currently they are putting their bets on Facebook as most us are there already and we many times let our network of friends and family know when we have a cold or a flu.
