Ann Arbor ‘s Sampfire sees business opportunity in connecting clinical trials to subjects

One of the biggest challenges to clinical trials isn’t funding or developing protocols but rather finding patients.

“One of the biggest problems in the industry is that 80 percent of clinical trials are delayed because they can’t find the right subjects,” says Milind Sahasrabuddhe.

That’s why Sahasrabuddhe and two others formed Sampfire earlier this year in Ann Arbor. The start-up focuses on matching researchers with the right subjects. Often researchers receive funding without the means to find test subjects, pushing back clinical trials months and even years.

Sampfire intends to streamline that process by using a large medical database to match up the right people with the right researchers. That’s becoming especially possible as more and more medical records are digitized, putting mounds of information (typically lost in piles of paperwork for years) at their fingertips.

Sahasrabuddhe and his partners are still in the initial phases of setting up the company. They expect to be in the infancy of the start-up phase for at least the next year. But they see big profit potential as they develop their firm in a research hub like Ann Arbor.

Source: Milind Sahasrabuddhe, manager and co-founder of Sampfire
Writer: Jon Zemke