Clinical trials are instrumental for bringing new treatments to patients. Despite the need to develop effective new treatments and sizeable budgets allocated to clinical trials, just less than 5 % of eligible patients participate in clinical research. In addition, up to 20 % of trials are either withdrawn due to patient recruitment problems or completed with a reduced number of participants from the target population. These problems greatly impair the quality of trial data, prolong the timeline, and as a result add to the overall costs of trials.

Studies have shown that one prevalent cause of these problems is the distur­bance of patients’ daily life due to the time­consuming visits at trial sites. Frequent travelling to and from trial sites is especially challenging for the elderly, children or patients who are extremely ill and vulnerable to infections. As patients’ blood has to be monitored frequently and closely during clinical trials, Clinical Trial Organizations (CROs) resort to home­nurse visits, which are not cost­effective solutions.

SangoRT is tackling these challenges by developing a cost­effective, home­based IVD medical device for remote monitoring of blood counts and common side effects of drugs. By automating and optimizing the workflow of blood tests for side­effect monitoring, the team is working towards enabling virtual and hybrid clinical trials, e.g., in oncology. The team’s goals are to increase the right patient recruitment and retention rates by reducing the burden of clinical trials on the patients, and to enrich the data insights by enabling more frequent sample collection. Our mission is to optimize clinical trials in order to get new effective treatments to patients faster and more cost­effective.

SangoRT is an interdisciplinary team composed of a clinical researcher, a medical doctor, a computational biologist supported by an oncologist/ hematologist. In the long­term, SangoRT aims to deploy its solution in remote patient monitoring to help patients live an easier, fuller life with their conditions while also improving the efficiency of healthcare systems around the world.