Upower connects patients to clinical trials, solving a major bottleneck in drug development. Recruiting trial participants costs $1-2 billion and takes roughly 10 years per drug. The platform gives patients access to experimental treatments while helping pharmaceutical companies find enrollees faster and cheaper.
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Can you give us an overview of Upower today as a marketplace? Yeah, totally. Pharma companies and biotech companies come to us because every drug you can take in the US has to go through 3 rounds of clinical testing to prove that it's safe in humans and that it's efficacious. It does what it's purported to do. It heals some illness. That testing for a given drug that gets approved costs between a $1 and $2 billion. It takes about 10 years to bring a drug to market. And that whole time that the trials are running, the patent is expiring. And so these companies have 20 years where they can market the drug under patent. They're really incentivized to try and get this thing to market faster. Pretty much all of that cost and bottle and like duration is because it's really hard to find patients for these trials. So there's a huge, you know, component of this industry where folks really want to find more patients. On the flip side, there are lots of patients for whom currently approved therapies don't work well. Maybe they've tried them all. You know, maybe you have friends who've tried a bunch of SSRIs for depression and nothing has worked. Or maybe the side effects are unbearable. There's other folks with orphan illnesses who don't have any drug available to them. And then there's some people who like to do the research. You know, this is actually pretty common in cancer. And what they found is that actually the most promising treatment, like I found, was currently in clinical trials. And so there are all these groups of folks who are interested in engaging with research who right now don't have a way to get access. I'd mentioned earlier this government website that's written for PhDs, really hard to parse. Well, the other thing is that There's very unreliable contact information on this website. And so we ran some testing and we saw that of 100 different clinics you might want to reach out to here, only 5% had emails that were being responded to. And so you do all this research and then you wouldn't hear back from anybody on the other side. There's some funny reasons for that. You know, pharma worries about competitors stealing their clinics, and so they often mask this information and don't want to give it away when they don't see the potential to recruit patients with it. But when they work with us, they're happy to share it because they know it'll be used to get patients into trials. So we're helping pharma save time getting their drugs to market, save costs getting their drugs to market, and we're helping patients access therapies who very often wouldn't have another option.
