About 4 in 10 Americans will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime,1 and most are treated with the same general techniques medicine has used for fifty years: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.2
When those stop working, what comes next is the search for a clinical trial, and the patient's family is usually the one conducting it. The search is hard because of how the field is arranged: around institutions, single drugs, and one-time trials. Patients travel between disconnected centers, the data they generate stays fragmented, combinations of drugs are difficult to study, and most of what is learned from one patient is never recorded in a form that helps the next.
Clarida Foundation will build cancer treatment around the patient, and turn each patient's treatment into evidence that improves the next one.
We will do this by building:
Trials are run at academic centers, often several states from where the patient lives, and each one usually tests a single drug and applies its own eligibility screen, which can mean repeating work that has already been done.
Reaching that trial is also expensive in ways nobody counts as a medical cost. Flights, hotels, weeks of work missed by the patient and by whoever travels with them, and care for the children left at home are the family's to cover. For many families that is where the conversation ends, and what they can afford decides the treatment instead of what the tumor is doing.
The search also spends the time the patient has. The disease keeps moving while the paperwork does not, and a patient who qualified for a trial when the search began is often too sick to qualify by the time they reach it. Whatever each trial does learn about the patients it enrolls ends when the trial does.
Instead of moving the patient from trial to trial, bring the trials to the patient: every appropriate option reviewed at once, treatment delivered under one protocol by one team, given as close to home as it safely can be, and the response measured all the way through.
That includes the patients no treatment currently fits. Today they are screened out, and they disappear from the record. Here they stay in the study, measured over time and matched again as new options open.
Inside that arrangement, treatment stops being a one-time verdict and becomes a loop: read the tumor, choose the combination, measure the response, revise — and record why. The patient never leaves care to enter research. Every turn of the loop serves them first, and teaches the system second.
This is exactly what the newest treatments need: custom medicines that teach a patient's own immune system to attack their tumor's specific mutations,3,4 adjusted as the disease adjusts. What they lack is a system that can learn at the speed the disease moves.
Run this way, a single patient's treatment produces a record today's system rarely keeps: every mutation in the tumor; every drug and dose and the reasoning behind it; the response, tracked in scans and blood work over time; and what it all cost the patient in side effects and daily life. Connected, start to finish, to the outcome.
A record like that is what the field is starved for. Today the closest things to it sit in private databases, mostly owned by pharmaceutical companies and research institutions. They don't share, because the data helps make the drugs that make their revenue. The result is a wall around the field that keeps new ideas out.
Clarida's commons will be the opposite. With one signed consent, a patient's data will flow into a dataset open to every researcher, with identities protected. Each patient will receive an analysis of their own data in return. Everything the trial learns will be published there too.
One pathway can change one patient's decisions. Many pathways, connected, can change everyone's: which combinations work against which biology, who responds and who doesn't, how resistance shows up, which trial designs actually learn. Clarida will fold all of it back in: better predictions, better plans, a sharper trial. The next patient starts further along.
Almost everything in cancer research is temporary by design: the grant runs out, the trial reads out, the program winds down. The consent, the data, and the machinery are torn down with it. Clarida will hold the part that should never be torn down: the consent, the data, the safety record, the regulatory record. It can, because it is a neutral foundation with no investors to repay and no product to protect.
Permanence also makes the trials cheaper. A drug developer or researcher can fund a new arm on the standing infrastructure instead of building a trial from scratch and dismantling it afterward. When testing a drug costs less, more drugs get tested, including drugs for smaller groups of patients.
A patient spends less of their remaining time and money traveling and re-qualifying, and more of it being treated. Science gets deep, connected evidence from every pathway, including the failures nobody publishes today. Developers and researchers get a cheaper way to test more ideas, including for groups too small for any company to pursue alone. And the field stops losing what it learns every time a trial ends.
An open commons, treatment and trials built around the patient, and a system that learns from every pathway while outlasting every project that runs on it.
or write to us directly: hello@clarida.org