Right now, the U.S. has 19,816 clinical trials open, all ready to recruit new patients. The trials cover everything from HIV to cancer to Alzheimer’s. Wired writes that about 18,000 of them will not go anywhere because they won’t get enough people enrolled. And others will be dropped after they start for the same reason. There are no patients because people don’t know these trials exist. The government has kept details of every clinical drug trial in a national registry since 2000, but it is hard to navigate. So pharma companies have to find patients themselves. But Pablo Graiver wants to change that. He is the former VP at Kayak, the online airfare aggregator, and he wants his new company, Antidote, to do for clinical trials what Kayak and Orbitz did for travel. Antidote puts together eligibility criteria. They hired clinical experts to manually standardize all the trial jargon that most humans don’t know into a structured language a search engine could understand, and then they trained Antidote to categorize and identify studies using language. The service is totally free for patients, and it currently partners with organizations like American Kidney Fund, Muscular Dystrophy Association, and Lung Cancer Alliance. Antidote says it reaches more than 15 million people per month.
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