Drug discovery (2025)

1. Interview with Meri Beckwith, cofounder, Lindus Health

   After the preclinical drug discovery work is done, that’s when pharma giants take over. They operate clinical trials, which can take as long as seven years to navigate, at great expense.

   Meri Beckwith believes this whole process can be done better and faster. He got the idea to overhaul drug trials after he saw first-hand just how flawed they were. This was 2020 and Beckwith — a former investor — had signed up to participate in several Covid-19 vaccine studies. “The experience was awful; the whole process was disjointed — how can the companies who run these things not build a functioning website? Why was it so messed up? That was the spark for me. I knew there was a lot to fix."

   Clinical trials — which involve the recruitment of hundreds or maybe thousands of volunteers — are run on behalf of pharma companies by third-party entities called contract research organisations (CROs). “It’s a big, clunky industry. They have billable hours like law firms so no incentive to do things faster or better. Essentially it comes down to that,” says Beckwith.

   Lindus Health wants to do things “radically faster” — 72.9% faster to be precise — and proudly calls itself an “anti-CRO”. Its pitch is that it can do everything in one, rather than requiring a pharma company to hire four or five different vendors to run a study. Lindus raised a $55m in Series B in January.

   The response to this upstart company has been “generally positive”, Beckwith says. “They know they’re being screwed by CROs. Once they work with us, they can see it’s a totally different model of running research.” The best responses come from senior people who work for CROs. “The stuff they tell us about their industry is mindblowing,” Beckwith says.

   When Lindus started out in 2021, “if we had tried then to go straight into working with big pharma, it would’ve been a disaster. We knew it was going to take a while to make progress, so we deliberately focused on non-drug trials initially”, which are studies that generally face fewer hurdles. The company has since expanded to drug studies.

   But pharma companies — which have ingrained ways of doing things — don’t adjust to working with startups very easily. “There’s definitely a tug of war. You need to find a champion who will help shield you from the worst of the bureaucracy,” Beckwith says.

   Still, it’s amazing how little has changed in the industry after the pandemic, Beckwith adds. “During Covid, things ran really quickly because they had to. It’s unbelievable the extent to which things went back to the way they were before,” he says. “I’m kind of amazed by it all still and the deference to precedent and the bureaucratic inertia that takes time to unwind. “And as a non-clinician myself, I do genuinely think that the industry massively over-eggs experience. You don’t need to know as much about this industry as people think you do.”

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