Clinical trials get the Miracle treatment

The startup innovating accelerated healthcare progress

Clinical trials are the lifeblood of the pharmaceutical industry. A critical stage in the development of treatments, they ensure safety and efficacy while supporting research and contributing knowledge to the medical field. For organizations running such trials, getting a product to market quickly and within budget increases revenue potential, advances R&D, and offers a major competitive advantage. More importantly, getting treatments into the hands of patients sooner has the potential to mitigate and even eradicate diseases and medical concerns.

However, clinical trials are also highly regulated, with stringent requirements for their design, timeline, and post-market monitoring. This also applies to data. Firms must collect, store, and analyze huge volumes of critical information, posing a significant challenge. Speed can never come secondary to safety and security, and with data often hindering as well as helping, the pharmaceutical industry has multiple pressures to navigate.

Startup Miracle understands these challenges, and together with Amazon Web Services (AWS), its team is using AI to consolidate huge amounts of data from across clinical trials into a unified real-time dashboard. Enabling clearer and faster insights, Miracle is empowering healthcare professionals to “bring new treatments to patients faster,” says founder and CEO, Jin Kim.

Transparency and innovation: the pills for progress

Miracle is a rapidly growing company with a big mission—one it’s already well on its way to achieving, despite its status as a relative newcomer. Kim established the startup in 2022, bringing a wealth of experience working with major pharmaceutical firms. Drawing on his knowledge of healthcare professionals’ needs and his technical acumen, Kim set out his mission for Miracle: “to help pharma teams operate with greater transparency” and “bring new treatments to patients more quickly by innovating clinical trials”.

Fast forward three years and Miracle has gone from supporting a single clinical trial to powering over a dozen global studies across diverse therapeutic areas. It also counts major publicly traded companies among its customers. All with a “very lean startup” team, says Kim. “AWS has really supported us to have this kind of outsized impact in the industry.”

Using Miracle’s solution, biopharmaceutical teams are realizing time savings of up to 20 percent by automating processes and making critical information available on-demand. With better visibility, several organizations have concluded clinical trials three to four months ahead of schedule, mitigating budget constraints and expediting product roadmaps. Miracle is also removing the resource-intensive work of compliance with built-in security and encryption from AWS, so healthcare professionals can dedicate their efforts to innovation, not regulation.

The side effects of clinical trial management

Miracle understands that biopharmaceutical companies must strike the right balance between innovation and meeting strict timelines, budgets, and industry guidelines. Traditionally, organizations rely on spreadsheets and siloed systems to log and access data. As a result, time is “wasted manually going into each of these systems, exporting data dumps and then creating their own visualizations in Excel,” says Kim. “They often do it on a weekly cadence, and anytime senior leadership needs updates, they go through that manual workflow which is tedious and error prone.”

This doesn’t just impact smaller biotechs with limited resources. Having worked with big pharma at the beating heart of the pharmaceutical sector, “I got to see first-hand how long data integrations took, even with all the manpower and big budgets,” says Kim.

The result? Slower, more costly trials and—especially for smaller biotechs—being forced to operate under the burden of “the biggest question”, says Kim: “will we finish our clinical trial before we run out of money?”

Integration: the wonder drug

Miracle is helping organizations answer this question by integrating their platforms into a single data warehouse. Teams can access and interact with information in real time to obtain key metrics and “answer mission-critical questions faster.” “We've helped some of our customers get up and running in just two to three days,” says Kim. “AWS often already has a plug-and-play model that really meets a lot of your needs,” says Kim.

Furthermore, cloud infrastructure from AWS provides “high availability and disaster recovery,” he says. “So if there are any disruptions, smooth operations can still take place.”

Security, speed, regulation, and innovation

Teams can be confident that their work aligns with industry regulations, thanks to the robust security framework governing AWS cloud infrastructure. This can “improve biopharma operations and help biotechs speed up their trial timelines while still remaining secure, reliable, and scalable,” explains Stuti Vishwabhan, Founding Product Engineer at Miracle.

“Our customers really care about compliance and data encryption to make sure that they're protecting sensitive data,” Vishwabhan explains. AWS automatically handles data encryption, and with security baked into its services,” she continues, both Miracle’s customers and the startup can “balance speed with security and scalability.”

Data gets the AI treatment

Recent years have seen the emergence of another factor which is a growing priority and a need for organizations: AI. Miracle is using Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker which are both managed services. Amazon Bedrock provides access to high-performing foundation models along with a broad set of capabilities needed to build and customize applications that meet governance and audit requirements, while Amazon SageMaker allows users to build and train machine learning models while keeping data secure throughout the lifecycle.

Many such services are available out-of-the-box, “without needing to explore all kinds of different third-party vendors,” says Kim, which has saved time and supported Miracle’s “pace of innovation.”

“One of the main benefits of AWS,” says Vishwabhan, “is that we can utilize services without completely reinventing the wheel.” She adds: “this saves so much time, meaning I can focus more on the product and building out features that really address our users’ needs.”

As a result, Miracle has created solutions that harness data and empower its customers. Teams can interact with data in real time and in meticulous detail to create simulations of potential outcomes. They can see, for example, “how well their clinical trial is going, how many patients are screening for the study, how many are enrolling and actually going through all the different assessments,” says Kim. They can then project enrolment timelines, enabling teams to answer that all-important question: ‘are we on track to finish our trial on time?’ Because, as Kim concludes, “the success of their trial determines the life or death of their company.”

Even with the most innovative AI tools and technological promise, the success of any new infrastructure deployment is ultimately down to trust. Working with AWS, Miracle benefited from a well-established foundation: “everyone in the healthcare industry really has a great deal of trust in AWS,” says Kim. Customers know that the critical issues of compliance, security, and service availability are in-hand, allowing them more freedom to scale, innovate, and experiment with boundary-pushing technologies. “That's what's ultimately going to unlock more and more use cases using AI; I feel like we've just touched the tip of the iceberg.”

Addressing the trials of the startup

Trust, scalability, and innovation are also central to the Miracle’s relationship with AWS. Miracle uses services such as Amazon Cognito for secure user authentication; Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) for sending emails, monitoring, and management; and AWS CloudWatch for logging and alerts. Secure in the knowledge that its solution adheres to frameworks such as SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR, Miracle is spared from “building out custom solutions and juggling multiple tools, giving us time to focus on our users and building what they need,” says Kim.

The company’s scalability is supported by the “incredibly responsive” team at AWS, explains Vishwabhan. “Being blocked is not something that we can afford in a startup because we need to move fast.” She continues, “AWS has been really wonderful in helping us tackle engineering problems and answering our questions in a very timely manner. We have a dedicated account manager and support team that have resolved issues within minutes, and we also have access to a large developer community that helps us learn from each other.”

A positive prognosis

Looking forward, Miracle hopes to scale its ambitions by listing on AWS Marketplace. This is a digital catalog that AWS customers can use to find, buy, deploy, and manage third-party software, data, and services to build solutions and run their businesses. Not only will Miracle’s listing “increase our visibility amongst forward-thinking tech leaders within the pharmaceutical industry,” says Kim, “it’ll also streamline the procurement process and help us collaborate more quickly with biopharma teams.”

What else does the future have in store for Miracle? Kim is looking forward to seeing one of its customers receiving an FDA approval, following a successful clinical trial using its solution. This will mark “a very meaningful and rewarding moment” he says. More broadly, Kim hopes that its continued relationship with AWS will see its ultimate mission come to fruition: for the “entire pharma industry to be running more efficient trials and getting more medicine to patients faster.”