Adding to the momentum of cloud services in the health care industry, goBalto Inc. raised another $12 million from investors on Wednesday to help accelerate the development of new drugs. The investment brings the startup’s total funding to $37.6 million, making it one of the most well-funded of the crop of software-as-a-service players that emerged in recent years to clear the sector’s logistical bottlenecks.

The team, which includes veterans of half a dozen major pharmaceutical companies, takes its name from a sled dog that helped complete the final stretch of an expedition credited with saving the remote Alaskan town of Nome from a major epidemic in the early 20th century. That story corresponds perfectly to what goBalto hopes to accomplish with its platform, which tackles one of the most difficult parts of the journey to regulatory approval: clinical trials.

Its service provides a centralized environment for sharing the thousands of regulatory records and technical documents involved in the testing of a new drug among the relevant parties. The platform makes it possible to aggregate individual files into workflows that can be updated from a single location when changes to project requirements arise while allowing team members to stay updated on goals without having to maintain a personal library of spreadsheets.

Complementing the service is an analytics console available separately that goBalto says can help decision-makers gain a better and more current view of how clinical trials are progressing. The startup is positioning the bundle as a much more functional alternative to Excel – often the productivity tool of choice for managing drug experiments – that is nonetheless cheaper and easier to use than the custom systems some large pharmaceutics employ to handle the process.

Along with the oncology analytics service from COTA Inc., another recently funded cloud startup, goBalto’s offering falls under the category of solutions trying to bring functionality that has become commonplace in the mainstream enterprise to the slow-moving health care sector. It’s not necessarily as groundbreaking as the cutting-edge research IBM is helping to enable with Watson, but it addresses an equally important need that could have an even bigger impact on the quality of care in the immediate future.

By sparing researchers from having to manually sort through thousands of pages before every trial and deal with the inevitable inconsistencies that occur afterwards, goBalto hopes to cut the duration of each test and cut the overall amount of time it takes to get a new drug approved. Besides simply reducing the wait for the patients who needs the medicine, that also makes the process less prohibitive to pharmaceutical companies, potentially lowering costs and enabling more research.

Over half of the world’s top 20 drug makers already use goBalto’s platform, adoption that the new funding is meant to help grow. Dolby Family Ventures and Mitsui Global Investment, the private equity arm of Japanese conglomerate giant Mitsui & Co., Ltd., led the round.

image courtesy of goBalto Blog