Research reveals that 95% of patients do not participate in clinical trials. How do we find better ways to connect willing and qualified participants to clinical trials? How do we ensure diversity in participant populations? And how can we make access to clinical trials more patient-friendly? We will get those answers and more in this episode with Brandon Li, Co-Founder at Power. Power is a fast-growing startup building a patient-friendly way to get access to clinical trials and is working to increase the diversity in clinical trials.

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Episode Transcript:

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Are there better ways to connect willing and qualified participants to clinical trials? How do you ensure diversity in participant populations? And why do 97% of patients not participate in clinical trials? We'll get those answers and more on this episode of Research in Action. 

  

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The need to. 

  

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Build the Hello and welcome to Research and Action, brought to you by Oracle Life Sciences. I'm Mike Stiles, and our guest today is Brandon Lee, co-founder at Power. Power is building a patient friendly way to get access to clinical trials, and they're working on increasing the diversity in clinical trials. Brandon, thanks for taking the time to be with us today. 

  

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Yeah, it's my pleasure. 

  

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Great. Well, looking forward to it. And we are going to be talking about some amazing stuff as always. But we also always like to get a feel for the person behind that amazing stuff. So what did you want to be when you grew up and how did you get from there to the field of clinical trials and technology and the kind of things you're doing now? 

  

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It depends on how far back you want to go, but I think that through most of my childhood, I probably wanted to be a like a professional trading card game player as. 

  

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Are you a Pokemon man or. 

  

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It was it was all of the above, right? It was like a Pokemon journey. Then there was like a, you know, journey. Then there was a magic. The Gathering journey. I kind of cycled through all of them, but I ended up landing on magic, I think, for most of it. 

  

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Well, check those old cards. You could be a millionaire. 

  

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I've been. I've been watching the the price of Charizard skyrocket with a lot of energy. You remember having plenty of money? 

  

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Well, great. Yeah, but obviously that's not what you wound up doing full on. 

  

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No, not at all. Yeah, I think the kind of journey here was. Well, at some point I became a consumer internet. Consumer marketplace person sometime between my my kind of professional trading card game times and and kind of coming out of college, I started thinking a lot more about consumer tech. So I spent a handful of years just doing things that look a lot like classic consumer marketplace work. 

  

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Thumbtack, Airbnb, Zillow, all kinds of kinds of products. And at one point I had a close friend of mine diagnosed with a brain tumor who had to go looking for a clinical trial on her own and, you know, that journey was brutal for her. She did everything that patients basically go and do today, which is backchannel the heck out of every doctor that she knows. 

  

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And eventually all roads ended up leading to clinicaltrials.gov. So she spent weeks there trying to figure out, okay, is there a trial that could make sense for me? Eventually, she finds one and the contact information is like the front desk of the hospital. So she's cold calling the hospital. The hospital's routing her internally. She's trying to find a way to get an appointment and eventually she gets in front of a study, she gets in. 

  

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And that's what they had a positive readout earlier this year, which is probably the happiest journey somebody could have gone through. But it was through that kind of experience that I realized a few things. The first one is that she can't be the only person out there who is sitting in front of clinicaltrials.gov, sitting in this kind of situation trying to answer the question, are there leading medical researchers that can help me? 

  

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And the second thing we realized was, while that journey is way too difficult today, right. Everything from even discovering trials in the first place to evaluating your options to figure out what you could be qualified for, what looks really promising through to even contacting the research sites. So we just put put our heads together and realize, well, I think that we can actually bring a lot from this consumer into that space and hopefully, hopefully help a lot more people in need. 

  

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So tell me what power was founded to do the problems that it specifically seeks to solve? 

  

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It's pretty straightforward, and I like to look at it through a couple of different lenses. So through the lens of the patient, it's exactly this kind of dream that I just described, right? It's helping individuals find and get access to leading medical researchers that could help them from the perspective of the sites. It's how do you connect with as many patients that are potentially interested in your study but not established at your site? 

  

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So maybe you don't have a relationship with them yet, but we help you kind of like widen that catchment area as a site and then as a sponsor. It's well, we give superpowers to your sites and we help elevate the kind of the reach of your studies to the patients that are using our platform. And we have hundreds of thousands of them now. 

  

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So plenty of folks on, on the website looking, looking around for trials and trial information. 

  

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So the people who want to be in clinical trials would find useful connections to those doing the research. And what's the level of the research world? How is it embracing the platform? Is it eagerly seeking to connect with these people who want to do clinical trials? 

  

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I think this this kind of touches on an age old problem, right where everybody I'm sure the kind of guest are. The the audience of your podcasts knows these stats, but we didn't coming in certainly turns out that finding patients to participate in trials is one of the biggest problems in life. Science, R&D, right? 86% of trials being delayed because they couldn't find the patients to participate. 

  

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So what we found is that we've had north of a thousand like research sites already, like just sign up to start connecting with our patients from the kind of ground ground up. And that's led to a movement that we can then point to some really interesting data and say things like, Wow, actually turns out that the the the research sites that are using power or connecting with patients like ten times more than if they weren't they weren't using patients. 

  

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And that data has been really meaningful for us to see. 

  

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Well, is it a database of willing participants that the researchers can go look at and find? Because it seems to me most patients, they are totally taking the guidance of their doctor, you know, and so is the doctor playing a role in connecting these people with these research projects? 

  

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There's kind of two things here. The first one is, yeah, we've got a registry where patients sign up and they say, Yeah, admitted registry. The registry experience from the the site's perspective is kind of like a LinkedIn for patients, if you can imagine it. It's like, Oh, there's these patient profiles, they've created a profile. I can see them. 

  

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They might have answered some prescreening questions at some point. So I'm starting to paint a picture of, you know, medical history and I can invite them to connect if it makes sense. So there's kind of like this LinkedIn for patients. And then on the other side, there's also, you know, new patients signing up every month. And I think that's where a lot of the impact is, because our view is that the patients that are most recently active and interested are the patients that are most likely to actually take action. 

  

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So it's all about new flow of patients in our mind, even more so than the the kind of depth of of the database or the registry. 

  

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And then what about that Dr. element? Are doctors aware that this tool is available and are they eager or reluctant to get their patients involved in clinical trials? 

  

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One of the most interesting things that we've started to see is that doctors are referring their patients to us, right? We're starting to see that in the data where, you know, maybe when we launched, nobody's doing that. And then a year ago, you know, you got a handful of people and that number has actually doubled like year on year of like the