Infiuss Health

Africa is home to the most diverse population(Genetically, ethnically, cultural, etc) and these all have influencing factors in health care delivery. By getting accurate representation of populations that cut across these spectrums, we can bee able to improve and predict better health care outcomes not only for Africans but globally as drug makers and researchers will have a lot more data to work with. Infiuss is on a mission to change that and wining this prize will go along way towards helping them achieve that mission. 

The elevate prize will provide us with the resources to continue our work of ensuring  more africans participants in medical research and clinical trials. Wining the prize will also gives validation that work we have set out to archive is possible.  Wining the prize will also give us the credibility  to reach out to potential clients and partners.

Melissa Bime is a 24 year old licensed Nurse from Cameroon. Being of the medical background, Melissa got to experience first hand the challenges patients in Cameroon faced at the hands of the health care system. She is passionate about addressing these problems and she believes that by leveraging on simple technologies, we can go a long way to provide solutions to this problems.
 In 2019, she enrolled into the Stanford Bio Design Fellowship and during that time, her team came up with a low cost pregnancy monitoring device to be deployed in low income settings. It took 9 month to reach 40% of our recruitment targets as they had to travel back and forth to recruit participants and when covid hit we almost abandoned the project. This made me realise the need for a solution like this to help other researchers.

Over 1.4 Billion Africans (the most diverse population) do not take part in clinical research and trials. This means researchers miss out on a huge amount of data that can be used to advance research in areas such as drug/vaccine discovery and also expose us to drugs and vaccines tested on predominantly white and European volunteers. 

We are a recruitment platform powering remote research/clinical trials in Africa, by connecting researchers(in industry and academia) to patients, participants, clinical for studies.Today, it takes researchers 6-12 months to recruit participants/patients. We connect them directly to thousands of eligible patients/participants for their studies. Thus reducing recruitment time by almost 50% and 20x cheaper than traditional Contract research organisations. 

We are building the largest database of patients and participants across Africa and partnering with researchers, research organisations and life science companies to help them rapidly screen and recruit these participants for their research so as to accelerate their clinical studies and investigations

Covid-19 is the digital acceleration of the decade. Since May 2020, decentralized trials have been the new normal, as patients are reluctant to visit clinics and digital collaboration encouraged. Researchers, labs, and pharmaceuticals working on clinical research, vaccines or drug discovery, especially those working on new therapies need more diverse participant pools and so they need to be physically present or use Contract Research Organisations (CROs) to launch clinical trials and patient recruitment in Africa. They take 6-12 months to reach 40% enrollment targets, using traditional methods: manually sourcing and engaging patients in clinics.

There is a need to decentralise clinical research decentralised and we are doing this  by building an API-first platform. Today, pharmaceuticals pay a licensing fee for the duration of the trial to use our platform, but we see a future where on the supply side: we’re integrated to electronic medical record providers across the continent to pull eligible patients and on the demand side: integrated with existing platforms of pharma and companies building decentralized clinical trial tools for other geographic regions.

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Our long term vision is to broaden representation in clinical research, regardless of race, ethnicity and gender and ensure that drugs, vaccines and medical devices  produced work equally on everyone.

Since we launched, we currently have over90,000 monthly active participants who’ve participated in 262 trials completed on Infiuss.  Over 240+ researchers and 13 research labs in Nigeria and Francophone Africa have used Infiuss for nationwide clinical trials trials and recently signed a partnership  with Sanaria Inc, US biotech company to power their malaria vaccine clinical trials on 280,000 Participants in West Africa. We’re conducting pilot studies with the Bill Gates affiliated health org(GAVI) and the Global Fund, who are key stakeholders in a $30B African fund, to position our tech as de facto for participant recruitment for vaccine trials. These will grow our monthly revenue 3-5x in Q3.

We intend to grow our participant database to over 1million participants across all 54 countries in Africa over the next 3 years, and thus become the ultimate pathway for researchers anywhere in the world to connect with participants for research studies in Africa.