Say hi to Power: democratising access to medical research for all patients
Frontiers for Good Interview Series
Welcome to Frontiers for Good Interview Series (suggestions welcomed for a better name), where we chat with the folks building at the frontiers of tech for good 🌍🚀
I am lucky enough to meet great pre-seed and seed stage startups all the time and thought I might as well create a space on the internet to highlight them. So expect to get to meet some of them in your inbox every month.
So here we are with interview #2. I sat down with Brandon Li and Bask Gill, the co-founders of Power, a clinical trials marketplace.
The Interview
What does Power do in one sentence?
Power is a marketplace for clinical trials.
What problem are you solving?
We help patients find and connect with leading medical researchers for their unresolved health challenges.
What’s the story behind Power? How did you come up with the idea and why did you decide to build it?
After watching a friend struggle to navigate the clinical trial system we realized two things:
There must be more people who are trying to help themselves by learning about medical research for their conditions
We could build a consumer-friendly experience for these patients based off our learnings having built consumer marketplace products before.
What’s been the highlight of your journey so far?
The biggest highlight has been the incredible response from patients and the research community. In our first year we had >300k people use our platform to look for clinical trials. The word of mouth has been incredible: doctors, loved ones, and patients have been sharing our website with each other as a viable alternative to clinicaltrials.gov
How did you meet your co-founder?
We met at Setter – a home services marketplace which we built and sold to Thumbtack at the end of 2020.
How will the world be different with Power in it?
For patients, anyone will be able to consider and access clinical trials as a medical option, regardless of location, race, or socioeconomic status. For researchers, trials will no longer be delayed due to patient recruitment because we’ll be able to meet patients where they are: on Power.
What’s your edge? What makes what you’re building different?
Our patient-centric product design. Patients choose to use our product every day because we build for them as our North Star. Because patients choose to use Power, we are able to effectively support the research community in patient recruitment.
Where do you see Power in 5 years? In 10?
Power will be the go-to destination for patients learning about medical research and every researcher will be using Power to connect with patients who are interested in participating in their studies.
Have you raised?
Yes – $7m to date.
What do you see as the next big thing in pharma/drug development? Anything we should be on the lookout for?
Patient centricity as an unlock for systemic challenges.
The industry is largely pharma-focused. Most solutions cater to the experience of clinical operations and study teams. Recently, there’s been increasing attention towards the site experience and site burden.
I believe that a big root cause is the terrible patient experience: we artificially construct too many barriers that make it difficult for patients to participate in research.
What gaps are you seeing in this space?
The one that Power is filling 😉
My $0.02
Why I’m excited about Power?
Recruiting patients for clinical trials isn’t a piece of cake. “85% of all clinical trials fail to recruit enough patients, 80% are delayed due to recruitment problems”. Those delays have real life consequences. They can make the difference between a patient getting access to life-saving treatment or having no more options. So who wouldn’t be excited about a solution that makes it easier and faster to recruit the right patients for trials and give them access to promising treatments as a result 🥹?
What they’re building has the potential to make clinical trials more diverse. Clinical research as it stands isn’t representative of the societies we live in. Women aren’t represented enough in trials (have written about this here), and the same can be said about ethnic minorities. According to the FDA 2020 Drug Trial Snapshots, on average, only 25% of traditional trials participants were BIPOC. Location and socio economic status are just some more factors affecting who ends up participating in clinical trials. Power makes it possible for patients whose best hope is a clinical trial, and who would be shut out from the clinical trials system, to discover clinical trials and get access to them regardless of ethnicity, location, or their socio-economic status. How cool is that 💁🏾♀️?
They’re empowering patients to be in the driving seat of their health in a way that I haven’t seen before. Most startups working towards the consumerisation of healthcare stop at healthcare delivery. They rarely go deeper in the value chain to touch medical research/pharma R&D or the clinical trials supply chain. But just as we’re giving patients/consumers the tools to have more control over how they get healthcare, we should do the same for patients who are considering taking part in clinical trials. That’s what Power is doing - they’re democratising access to medical research for patients and I’m all for it 🥰.
Thank you for reading!
Until next time,
Baci,
A.