InferMed was formed in February 1999 by a young management team, backed by Europe's largest independent cancer research organisation, Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK) and an entrepreneur from the IT industry. InferMed's mission was to commercialise the results of research applying computing to clinical research and clinical practice.
A research relationship continues with Cancer Research UK who remain the largest institutional shareholder. In addition InferMed has worked with commercial partners to develop MACRO, InferMed’s EDC product. A large pharmaceutical company also became the first customer for an application of the Arezzo decision support technology in the form of RetroGram. InferMed also continues to participate actively in EU R&D projects to help fund developments of new and existing products.
Initially InferMed had just six staff, but has expanded successfully to address the demands of its growing user base and to continue product development, 2002 and 2003 seeing particularly high levels of R&D spend. Since 1999 InferMed has raised small amounts of capital as required. Unlike many of the competitors in the EDC market it has focussed on developing and delivering software, rather than expanding into the field of service provision. This enables the company to operate on a much lower cost base and to pass these benefits on to its customers.
In order to address the service component required by the market and to enable the deployment of its products such as MACRO, InferMed has entered into a series of alliances with global services companies.
