The electronic medical records miner Elligo Health Research raised $135 million to help power its acquisition of the clinical R&D firm ClinEdge as well as expand its own digital study platform.
ClinEdge helps match patients with clinical research sites, biopharma companies and clinical research organizations through a global network while also providing digital advertising and outreach campaigns.
Elligo said it hopes to spin those resources into an end-to-end organization aimed at enabling healthcare research—including through traditional trials and direct-to-patient studies or a combination of the two—by adding its own data spanning 150 million patients to the mix.
The company’s series E round was led by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Ally Bridge Group, with additional backing from Norwest Venture Partners, Cerner, Hatteras Venture Partners, Noro-Moseley Partners, Piper Sandler Merchant Banking, Shumway Capital and Syneos Health.
“This investment allows Elligo to execute on a key acquisition as well as evaluate other complementary acquisitions to add technologies and services to accelerate research, improve the patient experience and make research more accessible,” Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital’s managing director and general partner, Melissa Daniels, said in a statement.
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“The clinical trials industry is experiencing a new phase of disruption. There’s an opportunity to use technology, data analytics and services to eliminate long-standing trial conduct pitfalls and bottlenecks that primarily impact patients,” added Daniels, who joins Elligo’s board of directors.
The concurrent acquisition and funding round follow Elligo’s purchase of Root Health this past June, developers of an artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant for clinical research. The company’s program helps trial participants stay on their course of treatment. The financial terms of that deal were not disclosed.