4G Clinical, a company that does drug supply ordering and randomization management for clinical trials, today announced that it has raised $230 million in a growth equity investment led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management.

Founded in 2015, 4G Clinical helps accelerate clinical drug trials using natural language processing and cloud-based services to optimize clinical studies and supply management.

The company provides what is known as randomization and trial supply management, which is an umbrella term for the fundamental logistics underlying clinical drug studies. It covers everything from enrolling patients, randomizing patients and managing drug supply orders. All of these matters must be carefully considered throughout the entire lifetime of the study or the trial’s data could be scuttled.

“This investment is transformational,” said David Kelleher, chief executive of 4G Clinical. “In just over five years, 4G Clinical has grown from a startup to a globally recognized leader in RTSM, helping life sciences organizations execute clinical trials of any size and complexity throughout the drug development lifecycle.”

By using NLP technology, 4G Clinical can rapidly read and understand written specifications and compile those documents into machine-readable systems faster than entire teams of clinicians. This greatly cuts down the time to market for drugs and is the basis of both 4G’s services: Prancer RTSM and 4C Supply.

Prancer RTSM enables life sciences companies to get their clinical trials running faster by reading and interpreting written RTSM specifications and compiling them into a machine-encodable format. That enables them to be formatted and generated into an RTSM system in moments, greatly shortening the time to the “first patient in.”

4C Supply is 4G Clinical’s supply optimization solution that incorporates real-time RTSM to help prevent out-of-stock events and reduce drug waste. It does this by using NLP to turn plain-English study parameters into forecasts and thus plan ahead for order overages and underruns.

According to 4G Clinical, the entire system is deployed in the cloud using Amazon Web Services with redundancy to Google Cloud. The technology stack uses Python, Angular Java Script, PostgreSQL and Django.

Since its launch, 4G Clinical has grown to support clinical trials for more than 100 biotech and pharmaceutical clients globally. “The eClinical solutions market has expanded rapidly over the past several years with best-in-class, tech-first solutions leading the way,” said Jason Kreuziger, a managing director at Goldman Sachs Asset Management.

According to a report from Grand View Research, the eClinical solutions market size was estimated at $5.6 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow to $15.7 billion by 2027.

Its current expansion is driven by software solutions in clinical trials that increase efficiency through drug management and bring drugs to market faster. Cloud-based solutions are particularly expected to show strong growth thanks to their advantages in flexibility and high accessibility, which enables users to take quick action.

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