Decentralized clinical trial (DCT) player Thread has bought CureClick to add a crowdsourcing platform for clinical trial awareness participation to its offering.
Thread partnered with CureClick last year to accelerate enrollment in DCTs by engaging social media influencers. Having worked closely with CureClick for more than one year, Thread has decided to buy the business in a deal that its CEO John Reites expects to bring “tremendous value for customers.”
“Through this acquisition, we can now offer it as a proprietary feature in Thread’s platform and a key component of our overall awareness and enrollment offering. Adding the technology, experience and resident expertise within the CureClick team to Thread further strengthens our solution for customers, our ability to achieve our mission to modernize clinical research, and our focus to be the most patient-centric DCT provider,” said the Thread CEO.
CureClick runs a network of more than 6,500 ambassadors and patient advocates that represent more than 75 disease states. The networks of those CureClick ambassadors and advocates cover more than 1 million patients globally.
Using the platform, the ambassadors and advocates can share clinical study information packaged up by CureClick. The packages include images and simple social media posts for platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to enable ambassadors and advocates to lower the barriers to sharing details of clinical trials with their networks. CureClick designs the packages to give patients all the information they need.
The decision to buy CureClick comes on the heels of other deals by Thread, which has bought electronic clinical outcome assessment (eCOA) consultancy Modus Outcomes and voice research technology provider inVibe since November. The deals are part of a strategy to use mergers and acquisitions to build out the DCT and eCOA offering.
“Thread, along with PE backers in Water Street and JLL Partners, continues to deliver on our strategy and utilize M&A when best suited to provide the most comprehensive DCT and eCOA solution for our customers. We have demonstrated in our acquisitions of Modus Outcomes, inVibe, and CureClick that we continue to invest in multiple ways to provide a single, comprehensive platform that makes studies five times more inclusive and 30% more efficient at scale,” said Reites.
