Accelerating Hope at Scale

Three years ago, we wrote a post on this blog titled Revolutionizing Agreement Collaboration with The Contract Network. We said we were starting a movement. We said patients were waiting. We said we would begin with clinical trial agreements and see how far that could take us.

Today, we are announcing that The Contract Network is joining WCG, the global leader in improving and accelerating clinical research. We think it is the right next step, and we want to tell you why.

In 2023, our claim was simple. Clinical trials are the bridge between research and treatment, and the contracting process that sits at the front of every trial is slow, duplicative, and opaque. Two or three months to negotiate a single clinical trial agreement, multiplied across the thousands of trials that begin each year, is a staggering amount of time that patients do not have. We believed a collaboration platform – neutral, shared, AI-powered – could change that math.

Three years of building alongside partners who let us see the problem from inside their institutions taught us something we did not fully appreciate at the start. The contract is only a small part of a much larger problem. It is a symptom. The real problem is that a study is one operational reality expressed across many documents: protocols, budgets, CDAs, informed consent forms, manuals, brochures, feasibility questionnaires and more.

Earlier this month, we quietly launched our new product: Study Startup Intelligence across the entire portfolio of startup documents. It is the product the 2023 blog was reaching for and did not yet have words to describe.

Which brings us to today. If the goal is to help institutions see the study whole, early enough to act, the intelligence layer we built belongs inside the work, not next to it. WCG already reaches the sites. WCG already operates across feasibility, ethics review, enrollment, regulatory, and site enablement. Joining them means our work shows up where the work happens, without asking sites and sponsors to integrate one more tool on their own.

The WCG leadership team understood the mission from the first conversation. They did not want to bolt us on. They wanted to extend their site platform with an intelligence layer that makes the rest of the work smarter. That is the same work we set out to do in 2023, at a scale we could not have reached alone.

For our customers and partners, the product you know continues. The team you work with continues. The neutral-platform principle that mattered in 2023, that every party to an agreement deserves a first-class seat, continues. What changes is the reach and the surrounding capability. You will see us inside the broader WCG experience, and over time you will see our intelligence connected to more of the startup workflow.

For the team at Mayo Clinic and the other partners who co-developed this work with us: thank you for trusting us with a hard problem at a moment when we were still earning the right to solve it.

To the clinical operations teams at sites, sponsors, and CROs – the study coordinators, the research administrators, the contracts and budget professionals, the regulatory specialists who hold all of this together – we see you. We have spent three years listening to what your work actually looks like, including the rework, the late-night document hunts, and the missed connections that should not have been yours to catch. We are committed to becoming an even better partner to you in your work to take care of patients.

For our early customers and industry partners who gave us feedback that no product team could buy: thank you for shaping this.

For our team: you are incredible, and we are so thankful for the opportunity to continue our work together. 

The team who built The Contract Network is going to WCG, excited to deliver the next stage of this journey. The people who made this work possible are the same people carrying it forward. That is not always true in an acquisition, and we are proud of it.

For our investors and backers who believed in us and a clinical-trials thesis: thank you for seeing what we saw. You bet on us and our mission. We are forever grateful.

In 2023, we wrote that we were not just building a platform; we were creating a movement. That we were not just accelerating contracts, we were accelerating hope. That still stands. The reach just got larger, and the work continues.

Jim, Bill, Maya & Phil