Healthcare / Product Research — 2023
Making clinical trial enrollment accessible to every patient, everywhere.
A clinician on our team kept watching his patients miss out on treatments that could change their lives — not because the treatments didn't exist, but because the system to find them was built for researchers, not people. MyTrials was built to change that.
01 — The Origin
A doctor watched his patients miss life-changing treatments.
One of our co-founders was a clinician who repeatedly saw the same situation unfold: a patient with a diagnosis that qualified them for a cutting-edge clinical trial — and no idea it existed. The trials were real. The hope was real. The pathway to find them was not. He brought the problem to our team. For many patients, clinical trials represent their best option — sometimes their only option — for treatment.
“Only 3% of eligible cancer patients ever enroll in a clinical trial. Not from reluctance. From a system that was never designed for them.”
02 — The Problem
The data exists. The interface does not.
We discovered ClinicalTrials.gov — the US government's authoritative database containing over 400,000 active trials. The inventory exists. The problem is the interface. Eligibility criteria reads like legal-medical hybrid text. Terms like “ECOG performance status ≤2” or “histologically confirmed NSCLC” create an impenetrable wall between patients and the treatments designed to help them. The system was built by researchers for researchers — never for patients.
03 — The Solution
AI-powered simplification, tested to a 5th-grade reading level.
We used GPT-4 to translate clinical trial eligibility criteria into plain English automatically. But we didn't stop there — we ran four rigorous rounds of user testing with non-medical participants, measuring reading level via Flesch-Kincaid scoring until we hit our target without losing essential meaning. Round 1 scored Grade 11 (too complex). Round 4 scored Grade 4.9 — our target hit. I named the product “MyTrials” — personal, possessive, and instantly clear.
04 — Outcome
$200,000 raised on the strength of the mission.
The investment thesis was clear: the problem is enormous and well-documented, the technology exists, and for the first time the user experience has been built for patients rather than researchers. Investors believed in both the social impact and the commercial opportunity. The platform expanded to cover 10,000+ active trials across 15 therapeutic areas.
05 — What this project taught me
Designing for health literacy is the highest form of empathy in product work.
Test for the user's reading level, not your own
We ran four full rounds of Flesch-Kincaid testing to get our clinical language down to a Grade 5 reading level without losing meaning. The work of simplification is infinitely harder than the work of complexity. Any expert can write something confusing. Clarity takes real effort.
A doctor on the team changes everything
Having a clinician co-founder meant we had someone who could evaluate our plain-English translations for accuracy. A product that simplifies medical jargon incorrectly is worse than no product at all. Cross-domain teams are a product advantage, not just a cultural one.
The problem space validates the product
The investment came before the full product was built because the problem was undeniable and measurable. Learning to lead with the problem — and the clear evidence of its scale — before pitching the solution made the fundraise more about validation than persuasion.
Social impact and commercial value can coexist
MyTrials was built to help patients first. But the commercial model — connecting pharma companies to better-matched trial participants — meant the mission and the business model were aligned. The best products solve a real problem for a real person, and that alignment creates durable value for everyone.
$200k raised — 10,000+ trials indexed