Topography Health Emerges From Stealth With $21.5 Million to Help Patients Access Life-Saving Clinical Trials

Keerthi Vedantam

Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.

Topography Health Emerges From Stealth With $21.5 Million to Help Patients Access Life-Saving Clinical Trials

After getting to know one another, Topography Health’s co-founders realized that they had all witnessed family members try—sometimes unsuccessfully—to access clinical trials for emerging drugs addressing treatment-resistant medical issues.


That proved the genesis of Topography Health, a Los Angeles- and New York-based clinical trials startup that came out of stealth Wednesday with $21.5 million in Series A funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. Silicon Valley venture firm Andreesen Horowitz, which led Topography’s $6 million seed round in 2020, also participated. (Disclosure: dot.LA co-founder and chairman Spencer Rascoff is among Topography’s investors.)

\u200bTopography Health co-founder Andrew Kirchner.

Topography Health co-founder Andrew Kirchner.

Courtesy of Topography Health

Topography works with physicians by offering them various clinical trials to enlist their patients in. If a gastroenterologist has a patient with a chronic, treatment-resistant gut problem, that doctor can recommend enlisting them in a drug trial potentially addressing the condition, while continuing to monitor the patient. Topography takes care of all the administrative work involved with the clinical trials, like coordinating with pharmaceutical companies and assisting with patient recruiting.

The startup’s “north star,” co-founder Andrew Kirchner told dot.LA, is to eliminate the “negative connotation of regulatory burden and complexity” often associated with clinical research.

Clinical trials are one of the first steps toward getting a new drug or treatment into the hands of patients, but they usually cater to the white and wealthy due to the nature of participating in them. They force participants to drive long distances, spend time in research facilities and follow protocols requiring flexibility in their everyday lives—all of which can exclude people who are poor, disabled or live in rural areas from accessing potentially life-saving treatments.

Topography joins a growing number of companies tackling diversity gaps and inefficiencies in the clinical trial space, which can down drug innovation and development. Some have embraced virtual trials; MedVector, a virtual clinical trial platform based in L.A., raised $630,000 in crowdfunding last March, while El Segundo-based Lightship raised $40 million in September to help patients participate in clinical trials from home.

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Starships Were Meant To Fly: Astrolab's New Jeep-Sized Rover Gets a Lift from SpaceX

Lon Harris
Lon Harris is a contributor to dot.LA. His work has also appeared on ScreenJunkies, RottenTomatoes and Inside Streaming.
Starships Were Meant To Fly: Astrolab's New Jeep-Sized Rover Gets a Lift from SpaceX
Photo by Samson Amore

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Local Los Angeles-area startup Astrolab Inc. has designed a new lunar vehicle called FLEX, short for Flexible Logistics and Exploration Rover. About the size of a Jeep Wrangler, FLEX is designed to move cargo around the surface of the moon on assignment. It’s a bit larger than NASA’s Mars rovers, like Perseverance, but as it’s designed for transport and mobility rather than precision measurement, it can travel much faster, at speeds of up to 15 miles per hour across the lunar surface.

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Meet the Creator Economy’s Version of LinkedIn

Kristin Snyder

Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.

Meet the Creator Economy’s Version of LinkedIn
Creatorland

This is the web version of dot.LA’s daily newsletter. Sign up to get the latest news on Southern California’s tech, startup and venture capital scene.

LinkedIn hasn’t caught on with Gen Z—in fact, 96% rarely use their existing account.

Considering 25% of young people want to be full-time content creators and most influencers aren’t active on LinkedIn, traditional networking sites aren’t likely to meet these needs.

Enter CreatorLand.

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This Week in ‘Raises’: Total Network Services Gains $9M, Autio Secures $5.9M

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

This Week in ‘Raises’: Total Network Services Gains $9M, Autio Secures $5.9M
This Week in ‘Raises’:

It has been a slow week in funding, but a local decentralized computing network managed to land $9 million to accelerate deployment of its new product called Universal Communication Identifier (UCID™). Another local company that secured capital included Kevin Costner’s location-based audio storytelling platform and the funding will go toward expanding the app’s content library and expanding into additional regions in the United States.

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