Every month, MassBio spotlights a member company and the great work they’re doing to advance the life sciences industry and support the patients we serve. In July, we spoke with Dave Hanaman, President & Chief Commercial Officer of Curavit. Dave is an entrepreneur who invests, teaches leadership, and serves as a board member and advisor to several start-up and growth-stage companies in healthcare and technology. He co-founded and served as the leader of sales, marketing, and product development for the company C3i, which was sold to Merck in 2014.
Tell us about your organization, its mission, and current initiatives.
Curavit is the world’s first all-virtual CRO that designs and executes fully decentralized clinical trials. We leverage emerging technologies in mobile health, cloud computing, and data science to recruit, engage, and monitor diverse patient populations from wherever they live, work, or study; across the country, and around the globe; increasing data quality and eliminating the need for physical infrastructure and travel. Bringing together leading researchers, trials with Curavit lower costs, improve quality, increase patient diversity, and decrease patient burden. We are always audit ready, optimizing an efficient operational, regulatory, and clinical study team. Curavit is paving the way for the future of clinical trials.
How do your organization’s activities help patients now and into the future?
While traditional trials involve a lot of brick and mortar, and very high administrative effort, our virtual trials can be undertaken with one world-class principal investigator, recruiting patients from anywhere they live, work, or study. This eliminates layers of bureaucracy, inconsistencies, and logistical complications, which lessens the impact on study participants. In this way, we go from being site-centric to being patient-centric. Virtual trials help achieve diversity by recruiting patients from anywhere, yielding access to populations who are not geographically near to traditional physical trial sites, or who cannot afford to take time off from work to participate in a trial. By creating a more diverse patient-centric environment, we are able to optimize patients’ valuable time and efforts, yielding much more meaningful and timely insights.
What do you see as the biggest challenge facing the life sciences industry today?
The biggest challenge facing the life sciences industry today is the ability to remain efficient and flexible when navigating the evolution of modern society while maintaining a high standard of quality. Taking, for example, the COVID 19 pandemic. Every industry’s world was turned upside down, including the clinical science space. The life sciences industry should know they can turn to Curavit to allow safe, effective, first-rate trials no matter what life throws our way.
What’s next for your organization / what are you focused on in the coming year?
Curavit’s clients are some of the most innovative biotech, pharmaceutical, and academic research organizations in the world, including some right here in Massachusetts. Recently, we have begun to work with a number of exciting companies focused on developing digital therapeutics. This sector now accounts for half of our clients. This year we will continue to expand our work in biotech and digital therapeutics, as well as deepen our expertise in key therapeutic areas.
If you’re interested in being featured in MassBio’s Member Spotlight, please see guidelines here.