MyTomorrows raises further €10M to help access drugs in development

MyTomorrows, the Netherlands-headquartered startup that has built a platform to help physicians and patients access drugs that are still in development, has raised €10 million in further funding. Leading the round is EQT Ventures, and Octopus Ventures, with participation from existing backers Balderton Capital, and Sofinnova Partners.

The Dutch startup wants to disrupt the way patients with unmet medical needs access development-stage treatments — drugs that are still undergoing clinical trials and working their way through a lengthy regulatory approval process, or are already approved in one country but not another.

Launched in 17 countries, the myTomorrows platform targets doctors and patients seeking information and access to nascent drugs while offering drug development companies a turn-key solution to run global early access programs. The idea is to make drugs still in development accessible to patients suffering from life threatening or debilitating diseases, and gather crucial data to bring those drugs fully to market much sooner than might otherwise happen.

The myTomorrows database has indexed 315,000 clinical trials and early access programs, combining data from 17 global registries. Key to this is what the startup describes as a patient and physician friendly interface that aims to reduce information asymmetry. It also makes the data available via a public API.

I’m told that a recent regulatory change in the U.S. (Clinical Trials Transparency Act) is placing pressure on drugs companies to expand access and therefore driving adoption of myTomorrows. It’s been suggested that the Trump administration may be more liberal in respect to access to development-stage drugs and physician/patient choice too, but we’ll have wait and see how that pans out. These things tend to be in the detail not the rhetoric.

Meanwhile, with the new funding, myTomorrows says it will invest in technology and headcount in order to “unburden regulators, physicians and drug developers from the complex processes of providing access to investigational drugs for patients facing unmet medical needs”.