WELL Health Launches WELL Research as Integrated CRO, SMO, and Bioanalytical Platform Built on Canada’s Largest Outpatient Network

• WELL Health Technologies Corp., Canada’s largest outpatient healthcare company, has launched WELL Research — a consolidated clinical research brand offering full-service CRO trial management for early-phase studies, Site Management Organization execution for late-phase sites, and bioanalytical services across all trial phases — underpinned by a network of 275 outpatient clinics, 45,000+ connected healthcare providers, over 100,000 consented patients, and HEALWELL AI’s DARWEN feasibility and participant-matching platform.

• WELL Research brings together two established clinical research entities — BioPharma Services Inc. (BPSI), a full-service CRO and bioanalytical laboratory with 20 years of operating history, and Canadian Phase Onward (CPO), its SMO — both held through WELL’s clinical research joint venture with HEALWELL AI, under a single brand and operating model designed to give sponsors a dependable, vertically integrated partner for participant identification, enrollment, and study execution in Canada.

WELL Health Technologies Corp., Canada’s largest outpatient healthcare company, announced on September 22, 2026, from Vancouver, British Columbia, the launch of WELL Research — a consolidated clinical research brand integrating full-service CRO capabilities for early-phase trials, Site Management Organization services for late-stage trial sites, and bioanalytical services across every phase of clinical development. The platform is designed to address one of the most persistent operational challenges in clinical research: sponsors’ inability to enroll the right trial participants quickly and reliably at scale.

WELL Research is operationally grounded in four differentiated assets that distinguish it from conventional CRO and SMO models. The first is WELL’s 275-clinic outpatient network across Canada, which supports more than 5 million patient visits annually — providing direct access to diverse, real-world patient populations relevant to a broad range of therapeutic areas. The second is WELLSTAR’s provider network connecting more than 45,000 healthcare practitioners, enabling rapid site activation and investigator engagement across the country. The third is WELLTrust, WELL’s consent-first patient platform through which more than 100,000 patients have already consented to be contacted about clinical trial opportunities — a pre-built, permission-based recruitment asset that no standalone CRO can replicate. The fourth is HEALWELL AI’s DARWEN platform, which delivers AI-enabled feasibility assessment and protocol-participant matching to support efficient, data-driven recruitment planning from the earliest stages of trial design.

WELL Research brings together two established clinical research entities operating within WELL’s joint venture with HEALWELL AI Inc.: BioPharma Services Inc., a full-service CRO and bioanalytical laboratory with 20 years of operating history, and Canadian Phase Onward, its SMO handling day-to-day participant recruitment and coordination at late-stage trial sites. The launch consolidates these capabilities under a single brand — creating a vertically integrated clinical trial platform that spans CRO early-phase management, SMO late-stage site operations, and bioanalytical services, with a unified patient access infrastructure connecting all three functions. For sponsors, this integration means a single CRO partner capable of managing participant identification, enrollment, study execution, and sample analysis without handoffs between separate organizations.

The launch positions WELL Research as a distinctively network-native CRO model at a time when participant recruitment and enrollment remain the leading causes of clinical trial delays globally. Traditional CRO models rely on investigator site activation and external recruitment strategies; WELL Research embeds enrollment capability within a functioning healthcare delivery network — connecting trial participation directly to the patient-practitioner relationships at WELL’s clinics — rather than treating recruitment as a separate downstream activity. The DARWEN AI platform adds protocol-specific matching intelligence on top of this physical network, enabling sponsors to assess feasibility and identify eligible patient populations before committing to site activation decisions.

“WELL Research reflects a simple idea: for the right patients, in the right setting, a clinical trial is a specialized form of care. We’ve spent years building the largest outpatient clinic network in Canada, a provider network that touches tens of thousands of healthcare providers, and a consent platform that lets patients participate in research on their own terms. WELL Research brings those pieces together into a single, dependable offering for sponsors and providers, and we believe it can become a meaningful growth driver for our network over time.”

Hamed Shahbazi, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, WELL Health Technologies