Cyrus Mehta founded Cytel raises $2 M in VC funding
By agencies   |   Thursday, 17 February 2005, 20:30 IST
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CAMBRIDGE, MA:Cytel Software, a provider of software and services for optimized clinical trial design and analysis today said that they have completed a round of financing and have raised $ 2 million. This financing will be used to fund additional growth both in the U.S. and abroad to offer broader clinical trial solutions to the biopharmaceutical industry. “Cytel has a strong reputation for developing outstanding software tools and services for the biopharmaceutical and devices industries,” said Ranganath Nayak, CEO. “This new investment by Merck Capital Ventures provides a solid foundation for growing a world-class company. “The pharmaceutical industry understands well the importance of improving clinical trial productivity, and actively seeks practical solutions,” said Per Lofberg, President and CEO of Merck Capital Ventures. “Cytel’s industry-leading East software suite for the design and monitoring of clinical trials, coupled with its widely adopted statistical analysis tools and its thought leadership put the company in a good position to do well in this large and growing market.” Randomized clinical trials are an expensive and time-consuming undertaking. The ability to stop such trials early for benefit, equivalence or futility, or to re-design them so that they are not inconclusive, has enormous ethical and economic value. East software was the first commercial software package developed that could aid statisticians in these decisions. Based on well-established statistical principles of group sequential inference, East software makes it possible to design and monitor such studies without compromising their type-1 error or power. Cytel has plans to release a number of additional analytic software products for the design, monitoring, and operation of flexible clinical trials. The company also provides consulting services associated with the design and monitoring of flexible trials.

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