Helping bring better drugs to market

Captario is a Swedish SaaS company founded in 2012 to make a substantial positive impact in the development of new medicines. The company came to life when the four founders, while working together at Astra Zeneca, realized that there was a lack of good decision support software for drug development. This led the team to develop a product that is currently used by some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

Erik Post, the President of Captario in the US, attended SACC-SD’s Annual Meeting earlier in March, and we had a chance to sit down with him and talk about Captario and its cloud-based software, Captario SUM. Erik, who has a background in Finance and has lived in New York City for the past ten years, explains his transition to Captario after several years in the world of banking:

“Captario applies quantitative thinking from the financial world to develop better drugs and vaccines, that was really appealing to me.”
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Captario works side-by-side with pharmaceutical companies to optimize their end-to-end drug development process. In the field of drug development, only a small fraction of candidate drugs will actually succeed in becoming an approved medicine, possibly as few as 5%. For those that do make it to market, the process takes on average 10 years and can cost up to $3 billion. Given both the high cost and low chance of success, weighing potential value against risk is an important factor in the decision-making process, and Captario helps companies do just that at both the project and portfolio level.

“If you look at risks and drug development in general, you need to consider your market and how your competitors are positioned. You really need to weigh all those pros and cons. Suppose you make it to market in ten years, what is the price of the medicine going to be? Will you be first to market? If you have different departments from development to commercial to corporate strategy, you need them to come together around a common platform to optimize for the company as a whole.”

​The traditional way of drug development leaves great value and unmitigated risk on the table. What is needed is both a broader and a longer perspective, that takes into consideration everything from the size of an individual clinical trial to the life cycle management of the entire drug portfolio. Captario helps optimize value and mitigate risk across all these aspects through a combination of augmented intelligence (AI), advanced simulation, data analytics, and human insight.

From left: Management Associate Alexandra Ahlstedt, Chairman of the Board Hans Janzon, President of Captario in the US Erik Post.

Adapting to change
As a cloud-based platform, Captario SUM is constantly evolving with the current digital climate. With their simulation-based engine, Captario SUM utilizes the full capability of big data modelling and visualizations.

“Captario SUM is a decision support platform that helps companies better understand strategic decision making under uncertainty, making the most out of each decision.”

Captario SUM can help companies with individual projects, or a company struggling to optimize a full portfolio. 

With the impact of the current health crisis already being felt in the pharma industry, Captario SUM has proven increasingly valuable in understanding the challenges facing drug development in this new environment. They are already engaged with a handful of companies in an effort to support their decision making during this time, which will result in better drugs and vaccines to market.

Entrance to the US market 
Captario is currently targeting the top 100 pharma companies in the world, and already have contracts with two of the global top 40, one of which is UCB. Captario also collaborates with a handful of other companies today, primarily in the Northeast US out of their New York City office. The majority of Captario’s employees, however, are developers and analysts working out of their headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden. 

As they head into the next decade, Captario is looking to the US for the next phase of growth, naturally leading them to Southern California. Southern California is appealing for multiple reasons. For one, while Captario’s investors are exclusively based in Sweden, they are interested in US funding within the Life Sciences and Tech arena. In addition, Southern California has a thriving ecosystem of smaller Life Sciences companies and in the next wave of rolling out the product, small and medium sized pharma companies will be targeted. California offers a broad range of Life Science Clusters, and Captario can offer an objective analysis and independent valuation of drug projects. The ability to accurately value projects and smaller companies, can prove very important for in- or out-licensing, company acquisition or going public.

Another reason why Captario is looking out West is to find possible partnerships, increase customer acquisition and expand their network. They are working on further expanding and maturing their offering in many different ways, including further data integrations and partnerships.

“We believe that by using Captario SUM, companies will be able to make the right decisions and bring better drugs and vaccines to market faster and at a lower price. And ultimately, this will benefit patients in need.”

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