Labtoo and Thellie, together against COVID-19 

The world is experiencing a major sanitary crisis whose outcome directly involves research stakeholders and their ability to rapidly develop a vaccine and/or a treatment against COVID-19. In order to do so, Labtoo and Thellie, a participatory fundraising platform, have joined forces to accelerate R&D projects on coronavirus.

What is Thellie?

Thellie is a platform intended to discover, share and finance research projects. Created in 2016 by patients and healthcare providers who aimed to become research stakeholders, this startup is named after two patients suffering from the same rare condition. Their families wanted to identify researchers working on their illness and to fundraise their projects to accelerate the drug development process. The Thellie platform aims to simplify fundraising for research projects and to ensure their good allotment. Its goal is to accelerate researchers’ work by strengthening their link with citizens, associations and companies to promote responsible progress. All collected donations are transferred to researchers.

"Thellie finances science by connecting researchers and donors. One advantage of the platform is to allow researchers to rapidly collect funds without cumbersome administrative procedures. In the current context, this is valuable" states Jean-Baptiste Roffini, co-founder of Thellie. "We manage relationships with hospitals and research structures and accompany researchers in these new fundraising practices".

Labtoo & Thellie join forces to foster research

"There is an urgent need to make new tools available for Research to increase its effectiveness and to rapidly meet our society’s challenges. The current sanitary crisis highlights the lack of fluency between laboratories and companies. Creating links between all R&D stakeholders is a lever to boost innovation in France and Europe" states Sophie Hue, co-founder of Labtoo.

While research on SARS-CoV-2 is multiplying, our two start-ups have decided to share their skills to identify ongoing research projects and private or public laboratories able to work on said projects, in France and Europe, through a participatory map available here. "The objective of this map is to foster scientific cooperation and exploratory studies which could find ways to be achieved thanks to Thellie and Labtoo" says Jean-Christophe Descieux, co-founder of Thellie.

Our three axes of collaboration are:

Identifying and mapping research projects: with the help of a participatory map of research projects to foster collaboration between researchers and patient access to clinical trials.

Mobilize a network of experts: by using the Labtoo platform to reference and access available service providers and support R&D projects on COVID-19.

Support participatory funding: with the Thellie platform to supplement a research budget or initiate the funding of pilot studies in all research disciplines.

The pooling of our offers allows academic researchers to launch a participatory fundraising campaign on Thellie and to identify the best R&D partners for the project in question thanks to our platform on Labtoo. This allows research projects to be launched much faster and to explore new possible avenues of innovation.

"Our platforms are complementary and allow researchers to use new tools. Research likes long delays, but we are now in an emergency and accelerating research projects is crucial. We cannot put on the sidelines projects in dire need of funds or scientific partners, as the French President of the Republic said in his speech on April 13th" declares Dr. Guillaume Leboucher, co-founder of Labtoo.