About Icarus Therapeutics
Democratizing access to clinical trials
We are a global TechBio company in clinical trials automation software headquartered in California committed to public health. We are Johns Hopkins-trained epidemiologists and UC Berkeley-trained software engineers with several decades of experience from the top life science and tech sectors rebuilding and reimagining clinical trials enrollment.
Accelerating the future of medicine, one trial at a time.
80% of clinical trials fail to meet enrollment timelines. We’re fixing that by building an AI‑powered enrollment layer that works for sponsors, sites, and patients simultaneously.
We are reverse engineering the standard pedagogy of protocols waiting to fail to meet primary endpoints. The number one reason why clinical trials fail is poor accrual/insufficient enrollment, and too often than naught, clinical trials are scrapped, canned, or stalled due to poor accrual rates thus limiting innovative drug discovery to market. Simultaneously, failure to enroll leads to dead weight loss across sites, patient communities, pharma/biotech and device budgets take a significant hit, and the pattern repeats itself iteratively. Icarus reverses that trend.
We remove the bottleneck that 80% of participants successfully recruited, on average, at 50% of sites. We remove that bottleneck to enable patient capacity to thrive and meet primary endpoints.
Life science sponsors are moving away from legacy compliance thinking and embracing the flexibility and bespoke “fit for purpose” design that the emerging complexities of clinical trial design so require, such as AI/LLM enabled solutions like Icarus and higher levels of customization for study participants.
Patient-centricity starts with empowering the sites that deliver patient care and research. What works best for sites ultimately works best for patients. By raising awareness of, and increasing the probability of, patient eligibility, sites improve enrollment efficiency, patient stratification, patient experience, and overall trial outcomes. Icarus’ end-to-end platform makes this possible by giving site researchers the tools, data, and insights they need to run protocols optimally.
The Icarus Pledge – Protecting Public Health
We are making clinical trials accessible to everyone to improve quality of life and significantly reduce mortality rates across all patient populations.
With oversight from a team of seasoned technologists and epidemiologists, we match patients and sites with our AI-enabled matchmaking software. We solve the supply and demand problem of clinical trial recruitment and enrollment by matching the requisite inclusion/exclusion criteria in the study protocol and schedule of events, among other variables, applied to electronic health records by accurately identifying patients that meet the complex eligibility criteria beyond diagnosis codes. This results in faster trials, more wholistic healthcare, increases completeness of data, reduces both patient and site burden, optimizes FPI scheduling, optimizes workflow integration, improves patient care and quality, lowers costs, thus accelerating drug discovery, and fairly balanced trial assignments critical to trial success and governance.
Icarus Culture
At Icarus, we believe that clinical trials are creative, not just analytical.
Our beginnings are in academic medicine and the pharmaceutical, device, and biotech ecosystems that we thrive in. Indeed, the concept of patient matchmaking with AI-enabled infrastructure came from a leading MD Anderson principal investigator oncologist, Pavan Bachireddy and Nate Hughes. At Harvard, the late and great, Dr. Paul Farmer, encouraged Nate to scale Icarus for global health equity access to medicines. The biotech community, and investor community, has rallied behind the cause to help patients find trials and help HCPs find the right patients as trials emerge that fit the I/E, officially requirements, even as protocols deviate and with a high degree of variability.
We have lost family members and loved ones who could have benefited from a clinical trial had they enrolled earlier and were aware of the appropriate trial. Similarly, the life science industry can benefit uncovering patients they otherwise would not have found to increase the net sensitivity and net specificity of patients in both randomized controlled trials and non randomized trials.
A typical day at Icarus might be strategizing with a site head on EMR integration, uploading a study protocol to Cheiron.bio to model improving inclusion/exclusion criteria, or diving into translational medicine with our oncologists. We live and die by improving clinical study design. We love to discuss odds ratios, relative risk, tech stack, patient relevance scores, and enhancing the robustness of patient matching. While we are contrarians by nature, we believe the future of medicine, in general, and biotech, in particular, is in the intersection of data science and AI-enablement circumscribed by humans in the loop (HITL).
We are in Cambridge, Berkeley, Birmingham, Torrey Pines, Chicago, New York City, and of course, Baltimore.
Icarus Velocior
Icarus – A Lesson in Risk Design
Clinical trials in general, and epidemiology, in particular, is about risk management. Relative risk, risk optimization, risk stratification, risk communication, and risk mitigation.
In Greek mythology, Daedalus — the legendary inventor and engineer — created wings of feathers and wax for himself and his son, Icarus, so they could free themselves from entrapment and achieve what humanity had never accomplished before: flight. The myth is often remembered only for Icarus flying too close to the sun, but the more discursive narrative is one of innovation, calculated risk, and the consequences of systems not yet engineered to withstand extreme conditions. Icarus did not fail because he dared to fly; he failed because the technology of the time could not fully mitigate the risks of ambition.
Evening (The Fall of Day) — William Rimmer