The Palo Alto, CA-headquartered company last week announced that it has been awarded two Fast-Track Small Business Innovation (SBIR) grants from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) totaling up to $3.5m in nondilutive research funding.
“The funds provided by NCI are being used to create stakeholder-informed tools that directly impact therapeutic approaches to clinical care and thus outcomes for patients and their care partners,” said Ingrid Oakley-Girvan, PhD, senior vice president of research and strategy at Medable.
According to the company, its suite of tools can be used at an individual, study, or population level. Ingrid Oakley-Girvan said the Medable platform was built with a specific purpose in mind: “To innovate in the health care space so therapies could rapidly reach patients.”
To be awarded over the next several years, the funding will in part support the development and validation of the mobile application TogetherCare (Track Outcomes and Guidance, Technology for Health and Effective Resources).
Built on a smart software system, caregivers can use the application to develop and implement home-based care for cancer survivors, according to the company.
The second award will fund the development of a cloud-based platform to capture and analyze wearable, implantable, or external device data. Dubbed DigiBioMarC (Digital BioMarkers for Clinical Impact), the platform provides an informatics tool for automated data aggregation, integration, and machine learning algorithms to support clinical trials and patient care.
As for what comes next, Oakley-Girvan said the team will test the new tools in clinical settings at Stanford and Duke. Additionally, the company is currently taking requests from other organizations, such as health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and other entities conducting clinical trials, she explained.
