Clinical medical trials play a crucial role in the development of new medicine, therapies and medical devices. Still to this day, the personnel conducting trials are often using pen and paper to mark down observations. Instead of potential R&D breakthroughs, specialists are flooded with paperwork. To speed up the trials and provide long-awaited innovation, Estonian MedTech startup Menken Trials is here to make the whole process faster, streamlining the traditionally time-consuming and error-prone aspects of clinical trials.
In this noble mission, the company is now supported by Enterprise Estonia with a €1,3M grant, announced earlier this month. “This funding will help us take our innovative automated monitoring solutions to the next level, marking a big step in our mission to improve clinical trial processes worldwide”, says the company’s co-founder Anna-Liisa Parts.
Menken Trials’ automated monitoring solutions offer real-time compliance checks and error detection, cutting down on manual work and costs. This has already caught the attention of top pharmaceutical companies who see the extra value in the technology compared to other solutions. The potential performance improvements are compelling: studies have shown that about 50 to 60% of doctors decide to participate in only one trial during their career. Menken Trials stands out with their focus on automated monitoring, a feature that is missing in the industry.
The need came from the founders’ own experience in the industry. Anna-Liisa Parts had worked in the clinical trials industry for over ten years, and faced quite a few problems in that time. One day she asked her brother, Jürgen Lorenz, who happened to be a software engineer, whether and how technology could help to solve the problems she had experienced. Jürgen then contacted his old classmate Andreas Ellervee, a developer with experience in healthcare systems, and together they started to play with different ideas and discussed the possibilities that technology can offer. “We then decided that we should try to make things better,” described co-founder and CEO Lorenz.
Now, by automating monitoring in clinical trials with real-time compliance checks and error detection, their solutions aim to fill a critical gap in the market. To enhance this, the team is developing AI models that further automate these processes, ensuring smooth oversight, reducing manual work, lowering costs, and boosting trial efficiency.
“We believe that our success comes from changing the way clinical trial operations are viewed and carried out. By focusing on improving workflows, we aim to make clinical trials more efficient and compliant,” adds Parts.
The next step is scaling. Estonia might be a great testbed, but bigger success awaits at the global stage. Recently, Menken Trials has entered Tenity — a Swiss-backed early-stage investing and accelerating program now operating in Estonia — as part of their growth efforts. “This partnership, which is already showing to be really successful, will help us expand in Central Europe, reaching more hospitals and biopharmas over the next 12 months. We are also focusing on expanding into Eastern Europe and Africa, regions with great density in clinical research,” says Parts.
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