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The Company will use the capital to fund the expansion of its existingpatient evaluation platform to meet increasing demand from pharmaceuticalcompanies. The capital will also enable MedAvante to apply its platform intonew areas of drug development, including monitoring by mental healthprofessionals of potential warning signs for suicide. The U.S. Food and DrugAdministration (FDA) is requiring most drugs with centrally acting mechanismsto be assessed for suicidality, regardless of whether the drugs are beingdeveloped for neurological or psychiatric indications.
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"The investment by Goldman Sachs and Trevi Health gives MedAvante thecapital and resources to deliver on our mission of helping the life sciencesindustry bring better and safer drugs to patients faster," stated Paul Gilbert,Chief Executive Officer of MedAvante. Gilbert further noted, "Our uniqueability to centralize and standardize the assessment of psychiatric patient'sdisease severity and progression is transforming clinical trials forpsychiatric drugs; we will now be able to bring this same new paradigm to bearin other areas of critical medical need, such as the development of newtreatments for Alzheimer's disease and the assessment of the risk ofsuicidality for all classes of drugs."
The former FDA Deputy Commissioner for Medical and Scientific Affairs,Scott Gottlieb, MD, a member of MedAvante's Board of Directors, commented,"The cost of conducting trials to treat neurological and psychiatric disordershas been increasing rapidly in recent years in large part due to theapproaches industry has been using to measure patient response. Larger numbersof patients are being enrolled in psychiatric trials simply because outdatedapproaches to drug development require more patients to be exposed to anexperimental drug to see whether it's working." He continued, "MedAvante haspioneered an approach that offers one of the most effective solutions toimproving the efficiency and reliability of psychiatric drug development,enabling new treatments to be assessed more efficiently for safety andeffectiveness and potentially reach patients sooner and at lower cost."
Andrew Fink, Managing Director of Trevi Health Ventures, noted,"MedAvante's solution solves the critical problem of enhancing precision andreliability in central nervous system trials head-on. This capital infusionwill enable the company to meet the rapidly expanding demand for more accuratepsychiatric assessment. Importantly, MedAvante has demonstrated the ability todeliver centralized ratings with the operational precision and scalabilityneeded to expand globally."
Walter Greenblatt & Associates served as MedAvante's exclusive financialadvisor in the transaction.
About MedAvante
MedAvante has pioneered and commercialized a solution that addresses oneof the global pharmaceutical industry's most intractable problems: the highrate of uninformative or failed studies. MedAvante provides centralized expertpsychological rater services to the pharmaceutical industry using uniquemethods to systematically remove potential
