The People Behind the Products: Matt Holms

Citeline is well known for our data subscription solutions, but there has been significant investment by the organization in patient recruitment solutions over the last five years. In my role as VP, Sales for Patient Engagement & Recruitment, I lead a specialized sales team focused on Citeline’s feasibility, patient engagement, and recruitment solutions (FPER) and help drive commercial strategy. Aside from leading a dedicated overlay sales team, I work closely with a variety of other functional stakeholders, including other segmented sales teams— Product, Marketing, Product Marketing, Implementation, Enablement, and Corporate Development/Strategy — evaluating potential partnerships and FPER service enhancements.

I’ve been in sales and sales leadership roles for 25 years, all in the life science space. The last 15 years I’ve worked exclusively in the clinical trial space, and more than half of that time has been in patient recruitment. I’ve worked with several Citeline leaders in previous organizations and was attracted to Citeline’s potential to expand into multiple areas within the patient recruitment space.

While I’ve worked across many areas within clinical trial technology/services, through personal experience, I’ve also developed a strong passion for expanding patient access for clinical trials. I have a 9-year-old son who has autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and when he was 4, we participated in a Phase II clinical trial where he received stem cells derived from umbilical cord tissue at Duke University’s Autism and Brain center. We had an amazing experience.

My father is a retired internal medicine physician and advised us when we were having our kids that stem cells are going to be the treatment of the future. He highly recommended we store our children’s umbilical cord and blood cord at birth, so we did.

My son was diagnosed with ASD just before the pandemic, in August 2019, and was thriving with services until everything stopped once the pandemic hit. In absence of all services, his regression over the next few months was gut-wrenching to experience.

Then, almost out of the blue, I received an email from the company where we had stored the umbilical cord tissue about Duke’s Autism and Brain Center running a Phase II clinical trial using umbilical cord-derived stem cells for children ages 4–11 with ASD.

The irony was I’ve worked in patient recruitment and know clinical trials extremely well but only found out about this study opportunity through a random email. My son is 9 now, and the results are supposed to be published later this year. We saw dramatic changes in his mental processing ability with language, and the entire experience helped steer me back into patient recruitment.

My favorite part of my role at Citeline is being able to work across so many different functions and with so many excellent people. There’s a strong culture of high expectations and hard work, but also ensuring people are treated right. In working through most FPER deals, I’m often involved, not only with my direct reports, but helping coach, mentor, and sharing knowledge transfer about patient recruitment with other sales teams and leaders, which I find very rewarding. Even though we’re a large organization, our recruitment solutions are kind of a business within the business, and we’ve been able to adapt and pivot quicky based on customer feedback to enhance our offerings. I really enjoy working here!

We launched a new product in January 2024 called Citeline PatientMatch that’s driving tremendous interest. Citeline is known for our data and we’re starting to use that data to help with patient recruitment, which is a totally new approach compared to more direct-to-patient traditional advertising offerings. Citeline PatientMatch is emblematic of Citeline Clinical’s evolution from mostly “off-the-shelf” data subscription solutions to more comprehensive, bespoke solutions deployed across large Phase II and Phase III studies.

Citeline PatientMatch leverages NorstellaLinQ, from our parent company, Norstella, by using the tokenized combination of our proprietary and RWD assets. We create a protocol-specific algorithm from a study’s inclusion/exclusion criteria, which serves as a methodology to query our data and identify in real time where patients match a complex subset of the sponsor’s protocol. The solution continues to evolve via sponsor feedback, which has driven continued iterations on the Citeline PatientMatch solution via product enhancements, wraparound services, and partnerships.

Citeline PatientMatch was originally called Lab Alerts where our initial GTM (go to market) strategy focused on using our near real-time lab data to find newly diagnosed patients in treatment windows for oncology indications. Unique biomarkers have become critical for personalized medicine treatments in oncology. Shortly after launch, we started getting feedback from sponsors in the oncology space saying, “You know, the lab value is important, but the lab values are just a piece of it. Oncology studies are not just newly diagnosed patients, but many are for second- or third-line treatments for relapsed-refractory patients where we need to understand their treatment history, especially previous medications, procedures, and diagnoses.”

The solution quickly evolved into the protocol-specific algorithm, utilizing a mix of national reference lab data along with EMR structured/unstructured notes and claims data. While we have a standard delivery service model, we have great flexibility to customize our workflow delivery with each sponsor’s individual resources for site interactions.

What differentiates Citeline is our data. Our patient engagement and recruitment solutions build off this data foundation to help sponsors create protocols that are more aligned to where those patients are, better inform their recruitment strategy, and pick the best sites where data confirm those patients exist.

Citeline’s patient engagement and recruitment solutions are not a one-size-fits-all approach like many patient recruitment competitors in this space. Citeline has built an ecosystem of patient engagement and recruitment offerings that can be synergistically packaged and provide extensibility with efficiencies for sponsors. Every study scenario is evaluated with a therapeutic-specific lens as to which solutions we recommend for a sponsor’s focus indication.

For example, the Citeline Connect Marketplace comprises 100+ vendors that deploy traditional, direct-to-patient recruitment advertising, which is a better fit for chronic ambulatory indications (i.e., healthy volunteer vaccines, diabetes, COPD, etc.). And Citeline PatientMatch is a better fit for oncology, rare disease, and any protocols with complex I/E criteria. There are synergies packaging multiple solutions at the same time, especially Citeline PatientMatch and our HCP Awareness campaigns. Finally, our Trial Portfolio Websites (TPW) create a single, sponsor-branded destination for various trial stakeholders such as patients, caregivers, and HCPs (healthcare practitioners). These TPW investments create extensibility to deploy other Citeline FPER solutions leveraging efficiencies from this technology.

The FPER team is also responsible for transactional feasibility services, which are essentially customized deliverables leveraging components from all our proprietary subscriptions and RWD. We’re seeing a big trend in the industry where sponsors are coming directly to data companies like Citeline, not just CROs, for site selection feasibility. Sponsors historically have leaned very heavily on CROs to get their sites, but CROs will not share their site list until that sponsor awards them the whole study. Sponsors are tired of this dynamic, whereas Citeline provides neutrality and an oversight of CRO recommendations. Our team also works directly with CROs for better data visibility.

Like Norstella’ s five brands (Citeline, Evaluate, MMIT, Panalgo, and The Dedham Group) supporting the clinical lifecycle from pipeline to patient, FPER supports the entire clinical continuum from protocol design to site selection and patient recruitment. Any feasibility approach should inform a recruitment strategy, and nobody can better help in this industry with feasibility planning than Citeline. Strategically, we want our recruitment solutions to be contracted before the study starts, as opposed to after a start when sponsors experience recruitment problems and you’re coming into a rescue scenario with limited budgets. Transactional feasibility often serves as a bridge to introduce recruitment solutions earlier, often even before the sponsor selects a CRO.

The sky’s the limit to not only enhance patient recruitment with new offerings like Citeline PatientMatch, but to think about other specific use cases that we can expand into with the flexibility that our tremendous data asset provides. Successful recruitment needs to start when you’re developing the protocol and completing feasibility, and it will not be anywhere near as successful if you’re not leveraging the data. We’re trying to shift the framework from thinking about recruitment from when a study’s starting to way earlier in the process.

While I’m dedicated and passionate about my career, at the end of the day, my family and my kids define me. I have two boys who are 7 and 9, along with an amazing wife. I try to spend most of my time outside of my job with them.

I enjoy working out, hiking and walking as much as I can. I’m also a rabid Philadelphia Eagles fan. We’re season ticket holders. I’m 47, and since I was 14, I’ve literally only missed watching five Eagles games. We suffered for a long time, but after a dominant Super Bowl victory this year, we are now living the dream!