Finding a clinical trial shouldn't take detective work or a Ph.D.

In January 2025, my dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. By March, he had surgery to remove the tumor, and later that summer he started chemotherapy. Nine months later the chemo wasn't working, and we were told we'd reached the end of known treatment - it was time to look into clinical trials.

Unfortunately, the best trial for him was already full at his hospital. He joined the waitlist, and his doctors told him to look for trials at other hospitals. My sister and I spent days hunting down accurate trial information, contact information, and enrollment processes for my dad. Using some key words and language we got from the doctor, we went searching for clinical trials on the government website, hunting down contact information for doctors’ offices when it wasn’t provided. Every trial we found led to a separate search to find out if the trial was actually actively enrolling and who to contact, only to hit a new road block - each location had a different intake and enrollment process. Eventually we did get my dad enrolled in the best clinical trial for his condition, but it was a tedious, frustrating, complex process that took way too long. And it came at a time when we were low on energy, and even lower on hope. A few weeks later, as we sat in the office of the clinical trial waiting to get his first dose of the new drug, I couldn’t shake the thought of what would have happened if we hadn’t helped him navigate this terrible process. We were lucky that my sister and I were able to jump in and support the effort to find the right clinical trial for my dad - but what about people who don’t have anyone else waiting in the wings to support this work? There needed to be a better way to surface the information needed and help people take action.

At a time when patients and families are running on fumes both physically and emotionally, taking the steps to get the next level of care they need shouldn’t feel hard or confusing at all.

Our goal is to make what's already out there accessible, and to give you — the patient, or the family and friends supporting the patient — clear information about potentially relevant clinical trials, and clear steps to take to enroll in a trial that's right for you.