Cori Clinical secures $4M seed to improve clinical trial design and cut delays

Cori Clinical, an AI platform for
clinical trials, has raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Breega,
with participation from Enzo, Heartfelt, Together Ventures and Bynd.

The company is targeting the fragmented
processes and disconnected sources of information involved in designing and
setting up clinical trials.

Cori was founded by Jorn Jansen Schoonhoven (CEO) and
Patricio Fernández (CTO). The company has developed an AI
workspace that brings together an organisation’s knowledge from previous
clinical trials with external intelligence from trial registries, regulatory
guidance and public sources, including the US Food and Drug Administration
(FDA), the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and
the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

The platform helps clinical teams turn an
initial trial brief into a full protocol, submission package and operational
plans based on current regulatory guidance. Rather than focusing on an
individual document or workflow, Cori creates what the company describes as a
“living blueprint” for a trial, allowing teams to assess proposed designs
against previous experience and external evidence, identify risks and connect
study-design decisions with budgets, timelines and operational plans.

Cori says this approach is designed to
reduce duplicated work and avoidable rework, costs and delays while giving
clinical teams greater visibility over trial planning.

Based on its internal modelling using
average trial set-up costs, historical modification rates and time to first
participant, Cori estimates that its approach could reduce average trial set-up
costs by at least 33 per cent. In an internal evaluation benchmarked against
amendments from completed trials, its AI reviewer identified 82 per cent of
protocol errors classified as avoidable.

Cori is already working with two of the
world’s five largest enterprise clinical research organisations (CROs). Its
customers also include Erasmus MC, an academic medical centre and university
hospital in Rotterdam, where the platform supported two clinical trials in
neurosurgery and neuro-oncology.

Jansen Schoonhoven said that clinical
trial design involves a series of connected decisions, but the knowledge
informing them is often spread across previous studies, different teams,
internal systems and documents.

Cori brings that intelligence together
into a living blueprint, so teams can make better-informed decisions before
avoidable problems become delays, so the science never waits on the process.

The team has also been joined by Dr Emma Ogburn as Chief Clinical Officer, bringing first-hand experience of addressing
long clinical trial start-up timelines.

Cori will
use the seed funding to expand its delivery capacity, grow its team and deepen
the regulatory and clinical intelligence within its platform. The investment
will also support the company as it builds on its existing customer traction
and seeks to develop broader commercial relationships with CROs and
pharmaceutical companies.