Infiuss

What makes your solution innovative?

Our platform, PROBE, a decentralized clinical trial platform that's the first of its type in Africa allows for  sponsors to recruit the most eligible participants in under 60mins with a 98% accuracy as well as locate the best sites and Primary Investigators for facilitating fully remote and hybrid clinical trials.

We are building the blueprint to help navigate running clinical trials in Africa,  We have also built API’s that facilitate interoperability with other DCT’s.

 Our technology is a distant second to our on-the-ground approach. To help negotiate the regulatory landscape that comes with such dynamic geography, we've worked with local regulatory coordinators and ministries of health.

Our field research coordinators collaborate with local partners to recruit volunteers from all demographics, regardless of whether or not they have access to a smartphone or the internet, reducing recruitment bias. We are developing the blueprint for attracting and retaining clinical research participants across Africa while expediting clinical trial timelines and ensuring diversity.

What are your impact goals for the next year and the next five years, and how will you achieve them?

Today over 1.4 Billion Africans (the most diverse population) have no easy way to part in clinical trials. This means researchers miss out on a huge amount of data that can be used to advance research in areas such as drug/vaccine discovery. 

Our goal over the next 5years is to build the largest and most diverse database of patients and participants across Africa and increase the reprsentation of Africans in medical research, which will benefit Africans diagnosed with rare diseases an opportunity to use these clinical trials as a care option.

How are you measuring your progress toward your impact goals?

we currently have a pool of15,000+active participants who’ve participated in 62 trials completed on Infiuss. Of these 6 have been rare disease studies which have successfully led to the diagnosis of of over 11 patients.

We have lots of experiments to keep growing exponentially: 12 CROs have reached out to use our software to execute contracts they have (it’s their only way to survive in covid times ;), we’re talking to Curebase  to built on their APIs to give their clients access to African participants. Last year, the Decentralized Trials and Research Alliance was created made up of 50+ life sciences cos funding 75% of clinical trial research (Pfizer, AstraZeneca, etc.) and health orgs like FDA. We’re currently talking to some of the members to have on-the-table access to research projects and be the de facto platform for getting participants in Africa.

What is your theory of change?

Pharmaceutical and Medical technology developers need to be physically present or use Consultant Research Organisations (CROs) to launch clinical trials and patient recruitment in Africa. They take 6-12 months to reach 40% enrollment targets, using traditional methods: manually sourcing and engaging participants in hospitals. Covid-19  has accelerated the adoption of decentralized trials meaning more patients have the ability to take part inthese studies from anywhere in the world and get access to novel treatments they did not have accesss to.

We are doing this by putting the following processes in place.;

Supply side: we’re starting with sourcing participants in Nigeria and Francophone Africa, representing over half a billion Africans. We pull eligible participants into our software from our current network of 50 hospitals in Nigeria and Francophone Africa. Also interconnected our platform to 4 EHRs (exclusive agreements) automating our patient acquisition efforts. Growing number of hospitals and EHR partners as we get researchers in other countries. Database to grow from 15,000+ participants today to over 100,000 this year.

Demand side: There’s been a lot of word of mouth from pharma and researchers using our platform. We spend $0 on marketing. Medical schools and teaching hospitals carry out 55% of clinical trials and have been our ambassadors, leading us to big pharma like Sanaria Inc and GAVI. We also use the clinicaltrials.gov website to get information on clinical studies being carried out on a country by country basis and information on those actively recruiting participants.

Describe the core technology that powers your solution.

At Infiuss Health, we implement the most recent, advanced and cutting-edge
technologies in building and managing our web platforms and to deliver a seamless and intuitive user experience for all our users(on web and mobile).
For our front-end stack, we make extensive use of JavaScript (powered by Vue.js), and the new Google Flutter SDK for building robust cross-platform apps.
For our web and AI-powered back-end, we make use of PHP (Laravel), NodeJS (Adonis.js & Sails.js), Redis, Pusher, Algolia, and many others.
On the Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) side, we primarily use PostgreSQL & MySQL as our central data store.
Our platform is hosted on AWS (through Heroku PaaS) and on our own company dedicated VPS. We equally have integrations for third-party services on the Infiuss Health Research Platform

Which of the following categories best describes your solution?

Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:

• Big Data
• Software and Mobile Applications

https://infiuss.com/

Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?

• 3. Good Health and Well-being

In which countries do you currently operate?

• Cameroon
• Nigeria
• South Africa
• United States

In which countries will you be operating within the next year?

• Morocco
• United Kingdom

What type of organization is your solution team?

For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models

How many people work on your solution team?

14

How long have you been working on your solution?

2years

What is your approach to incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusivity into your work?

We are a 12 man team across 4 countries and 2 continents. The entire leadership team is composed of 60% women of color and 40% Men.

Recruiting a diverse team has never been a problem for us given our business itself if that of solving for diverstity in clinical trials.

What is your business model?

We license our software from $10K/year for industry (pharma, medical technology developers) and $50/month to academia (independent physicians and researchers). We’re on track to do $60K MRR this month and have secured deals to 3-5x monthly revenue in Q2. In the next 18 months, we plan to be in 6 countries across Africa, with patient data from 200+ hospitals, generating $300K MRR.

Of the $60B spent globally for clinical research studies annually, Africa only capture about 10% of this, greatly as a result participant enrollment and engagement difficulties. This represents a $42B untapped niche market opportunity. In 5 years, we want to have the largest database of participants eligible for clinical research and doing ~$200M ARR

Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, to other organizations, or to the government?

What is your plan for becoming financially sustainable?

With over15,000+ participants in our database, growing 25% MoM. We have 3 big contracts pushing us to exponentially grow our patient database: Genentech (a genomic testing company in the US) has partnered with us to recruit 50,000 participants over the next 18months to help with their biobanking efforts.

 We've also signed with Sanaria Inc for malaria vaccine trials in Nigeria and we’re conducting pilot studies with the Bill Gates affiliated health org (GAVI) and the Global Fund, who are key stakeholders in a $30B African vaccine fund, to position our tech as de facto for participant recruitment for vaccine trials. These will grow our monthly revenue 3-5x in Q4 of 2022

Share some examples of how your plan to achieve financial sustainability has been successful so far.

 We have raised over $800k from silicon valley based investors including Y Combinator, 43North and others. We are currently closing in our seed round and are using these resources to build out our team, solidify our product offerings and be profitable