Following accelerated levels of growth over the last six months, Raremark®, the leading rare disease patient network and real-world insights provider has reasserted its commitment to patient-centric drug development by implementing a new, dynamic executive team to drive the commercial vision and future growth of the company.
Former Chief Commercial Officer, Jeremy Edwards, has been appointed CEO of Raremark and former Head of Product, Alex Garner, has become COO, while Chairman Neil Rotherham will continue to play an active role in driving the company forward.
Edwards has more than 25 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical and health sciences industry, where he has been instrumental in introducing small, European-based eClinical organizations to the US market, creating new verticals, growing operations, and increasing revenue. At Raremark, Edwards has played an integral role in the company’s rapid growth and development over the last 12 months.
Garner, who has been part of the team from the very beginning, has been pivotal in leading a team to develop novel design and technology concepts that have created the Xperiome platform and Raremark experience. Underpinning the design and
technology is his team’s belief in the power of lived experiences that can help patients and families to deal with the realities of living with rare conditions, identify highly targeted opportunities to participate in vital clinical research programs aimed at improving outcomes in their particular disease, and create powerful real world data-sets that can be used to develop novel insights into diseases and help facilitate the development of new therapies.
Further strengthening the team at this exciting time, Raremark has appointed Caroline O’Connor to join the leadership team as SVP, Business Development. O’Connor brings her passion for patient-centric healthcare and a wealth of experience in commercial roles in life science technology and services companies. Over the last 9 years her focus has been on eClinical technology, combined with establishing value and driving revenue growth from RWE and Digital Patient Support Programs in the post-approval setting.
The business has also raised £1.2m of funding from the existing principal investors, AlbionVC and Ananda Ventures. These new funds, which come in addition to £2.5m raised in December 2019, will allow the business to continue to invest heavily in the Xperiome platform, specifically its patient-engagement and data-analysis functionality. Additionally, it will allow headcount growth across all the main functions of the organisation to support the increased demands made by an expanding business.
Dr Christoph Ruedig, Partner at AlbionVC, said: “Raremark has created something unique in that they’re helping pharma connect with the most crucial part of the orphan drug development process – the patient.
The novel patient engagement engine that powers Raremark’s technology will help tackle some of the biggest challenges in the rare disease space, particularly around poor trial design and patient retainment in studies. We are very excited about the progress Raremark will make in disrupting and transforming the way rare disease drugs are being developed.”
Neil Rotherham, Chairman of Raremark said: “The positive trends and growth in sales over the past six months, led by Jeremy, Alex and the rest of Raremark’s talented team, has given our investors’ confidence and faith in the business and the leadership team to keep the momentum going to allow further expansion of Raremark.
Raremark has come a long way in the last twelve months. We have beaten our growth targets and helped push rare disease drug development forwards by shortening clinical trial recruitment times and providing much needed patient insights to researchers.
We also recently launched our new patient data platform Xperiome which both Jeremy and Alex were instrumental in helping build and launch. I’m very excited about the progress we’re making and will continue to make with Jeremy and Alex at the helm.”
About Raremark
Raremark is a healthcare technology company with the world’s largest patient experience platform in rare diseases. Raremark helps patients and families to confront the realities of living with a rare condition by providing access to educational materials, clinical trials, innovative therapies and shared experiences through a personalized and self-paced experience.
The Raremark experience is powered by the Xperiome Platform, which utilises novel design and behavioral science techniques to create unique patient journeys, whilst providing biopharmaceutical companies with access to engaged and consented populations to recruit to studies and generate anonymized and aggregated patient data unavailable elsewhere – supporting clinical development, accelerating speed to market and facilitating the evaluation of new treatments.
