An Ecosystem, Not a Single Website: Rethinking Direct-to-Patient Clinical Trial Recruitment

At Carebox, we operate across an ecosystem of patient-facing surfaces:

• Enterprise sponsor-branded recruitment platforms for tier-one pharma (e.g., Lilly Trials, AstraZeneca Trial & You)
• Sponsor-neutral, condition-centric experiences for 50+ advocacy organizations (including the Alzheimer’s Association, Stand Up To Cancer, Lupus Foundation of America, Blood Cancer United)
• Clinical trial matching and referral workflows for research sites, including UCLA Health and Moffitt Cancer Center

Sponsors invest in branded websites to engage potential participants in their trials. With the right underlying platform, those investments, along with associated investment in outreach and reputation, translate into continuous patient engagement, site support, and hundreds of enrolled patients per year.

At the same time, asking patients to visit dozens of sponsor-specific websites to understand treatment options is not reasonable. Discovery is most effective for patients and caregivers when it is condition-centric and sponsor-neutral. But simply repurposing ClinicalTrials.gov data, with AI summaries or not, isn't effective to support patients and caregivers in their journey. As a result, many “clinical trial finder marketplaces” end up either pay-to-play with a small subset of curated trials per condition or broadly comprehensive but shallow and unhelpful.

What we’re driving toward is a sliding scale of trial curation depth across this ecosystem. At connect.careboxhealth.com (the Carebox-branded Carebox Connect website that includes the full set of available trials across the Carebox Connect Network) as well as across 50+ advocacy-branded experiences, we support eligibility-based matching for 12,000+ trials. These trials are human-curated, though now the humans are AI-assisted, with the goal of near-real-time curation of all treatment trials on ClinicalTrials.gov.

That baseline is only part of the picture. For trials curated in direct partnership with sponsors who use our enterprise platform or subscribe to individual trial offerings on the network, we support:

• Up-to-date site status and patient-facing site contacts
• Dynamic questions that extend condition-based matching into pre-screener-equivalent qualification
• Referral pathways to sponsor- or site-branded workflows, via our platform-native tools or optionally integrated with recruitment service providers such as Trialbee, CTM, or Reify/OST

We’re working on technologies to improve the curation baseline on our network, enabling richer recruitment-specific summaries, metadata, and more current site information for all trials. At the other end of the spectrum, we’re continuing to deepen curated patient experiences, longitudinal registries, referral workflows, and analytics for our paying customers.

Where we believe the answer lies:

• An ecosystem of synergistically connected patient-facing surfaces with transparency and access to all potentially relevant trials for patients, while allowing for sponsor-specific investment and ROI
• A flexible, trial-level commercial model with varying levels of deeper data curation, access to registries, referral pathways, and analytics
• A strong, scalable common SaaS platform foundation that supports and integrates the disparate technology add-ons clinical trial recruitment service vendors offer

Collectively, these three elements enable discovery and execution to properly work together without forcing a false choice between sponsor-branded platforms and marketplaces or between pay-to-play marketplaces and shallow, low-value aggregation.