Lightship

Lightship operates a clinical trial site network that delivers studies across multiple settings — physical clinics, participants' homes, telemedicine, and mobile research units (MRUs) — under a single coordinated team of investigators, research nurses, and coordinators. The company matches each study visit to the requirements of the protocol rather than to the constraints of a fixed location, and states that physical sites combined with multi-state investigator licensure allow it to reach participants in all 50 states.

The company offers four delivery models: a traditional site model, serving participants typically within about 30 miles of a site and suited to protocols with complex procedures or specialized equipment; a hybrid model that combines in-clinic anchor visits with at-home and telemedicine touchpoints, which it says extends geographic reach by roughly 60%; a virtual model with national coverage in which visits occur at home or by telemedicine under remote oversight from principal and sub-investigators holding multi-state licensure; and mobile research units that support prescreening, education, and selected study visits in communities. Lightship describes its investigators as experienced across 13 therapeutic areas, including allergy and immunology, cardiovascular, dermatology, endocrinology, gastroenterology, infectious disease, internal and family medicine, metabolics and obesity, neurology, pediatrics, psychiatry, pulmonology, and women's health.

Business model

Lightship contracts with trial sponsors as a single site-network partner, replacing separately contracted nursing agencies, telemedicine platforms, and vendor SOPs with one coordinated team that executes study visits across in-clinic, home, virtual, and mobile settings.

Traction

The company reports that sites offering home visits enroll participants at over twice the rate of traditional brick-and-mortar sites, study startup in as little as six weeks (about 40% faster than the industry average), average patient retention of 95%, more than 40% of engaged patients coming from racially or ethnically diverse communities, and geographic reach more than 2.5x that of a traditional site. It also cites more than 30 completed sponsor audits with zero critical findings.