Lessons from Brandon Li, Power, democratizing access to clinical trials with marketplaces

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Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Every week, we’ll be getting to know trailblazing healthcare leaders and dive into building a digital health business from 0 to 1.

This week, we’re super excited to have Brandon Li, co-CEO and co-founder of Power, a platform to find promising new treatments through clinical trials. Power’s platform allows patients and providers to search every trial currently available in the U.S. It includes over 30,000 clinical trials and 100,000 researchers spanning 10,000 medical conditions.

In Aug 2022, Power announced a $7M seed round led by Footwork and CRV, along with AirAngels Syndicate.

Brandon has spent a long time building and scaling consumer marketplace platforms to help people navigate traditionally opaque industries. Prior to founding Power, Brandon was the Head of Bizops at Thumbtack where he led growth strategy for the Home improvement marketplace. He landed at Thumbtack after Setter was acquired, where he was the GM of California. Before Setter, he spent time at McKinsey as an Engagement Manager focused on fast growth marketplace clients.

Brandon has a background in high growth companies — Brandon is a serial entrepreneur, starting multiple companies across logistics, hometech and even suits! Another native guest from Canada, Brandon graduated from University of Toronto in Industrial Engineering.

In this episode, we discuss how to navigate the idea maze and the founding story of Power, building clinical trials from the patient perspective, diving into marketplace design and the emerging field of pharma tech companies.

If you prefer to listen to the full episode, listen here!

‎Pear Healthcare Playbook: Lessons from Brandon Li, Power, democratizing access to clinical trials…

Brandon’s path to founding Power:

• A few years ago, one of Brandon’s close friends was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She recovered in large part because she found a clinical trial for herself off a government run website called www.clinicaltrials.gov.

“It basically works as you would imagine it to work, which is to say not very well.”

• Brandon shares that that’s the status quo — most patients who end up on clinicaltrials.gov are looking for alternative treatment options, but the website is next to impossible to navigate without an advanced medical understanding.

Enter Power: The most patient-centric resource for learning about clinical trials so that any patient can get access to leading medical researchers.

• Brandon and his co-founder Bask met at Setter; after Setter was acquired, the two decided they wanted to start a company together. Neither of them had a background in clinical trials, so they spent quite a bit of time navigating the idea maze.
• The first iteration was more of an Uber for clinical trials, creating an on-demand experience for clinical trials to find patients. In retrospect, the idea was totally wrong — what they learned was that it was only really applicable to one segment of the clinical trial marketplace that seeks healthy volunteers with monetary compensation. The real problem is the space where there are real patients looking for treatment further on in the process of approvals, more like phase two or three clinical trials. They had started with the wrong assumption around the market’s supply and demand.
• Brandon shares what he’s learned about the two archetypes of marketplaces:
• A marketplace with homogenous supply and demand. The closest analogy would be Uber, where you wouldn’t mind which driver would pick you up and take you to your destination. The platform can do the matching for you in this world, meaning that platform-driven match works.
• A marketplace with heterogeneous supply and demand. Each individual patient and trial is different, so you need user-driven match. The platform provides the best search and browse experience and allows users to make their own decisions about what they want. Power’s model is focused on user-driven matches due to the heterogeneous supply and demand.

Power allows patients and providers to search every trial currently available in the US.

• Here is a recent example of a patient with multiple sclerosis looking for a clinical trial on Power.
• The patient had done a lot of their own research, learned about some interesting advancements in stem cell research, and came to the conclusion that the best option would be to fly to Panama to get the procedure done. The patient discovered Power on a forum with other patients and found a trial for multiple sclerosis within an hour’s drive of where they lived.
• Power’s goal is to provide a transparency and accessibility into the leading clinical research that patients can viably consider

86% of clinical trials are delayed because they’re trying to find patients. Why are there so many problems in the matching space?

Brandon shared that if there was only one reason, then there would already be a solution. Here are three different reasons that exist, and it’s not an exhaustive list:

1. There are patients who are interested and doing their own research, but don’t have the tools to find the options that they could participate in.
2. The tools that exist today don’t allow researchers to actually reach out to those patients. Due to HIPAA, researchers can’t analyze somebody’s medical records and recruit them directly for their trials.
3. A high level of competitiveness in certain disease areas. Brandon mentions the example of non small cell lung cancer, one of the most highly researched conditions for clinical trials. Many researchers are competing to find the same pool of patients.

Power’s platform features have only begun. What’s next?

• It sounds simple, but the first thing Power did was focus on the basics that you’d expect from any consumer experience that just isn’t possible today via clinicaltrials.gov:
• For example, they built location-based search, making each site its own individual entity and then allowing people to identify the nearest locations for them.
• Over time, they want to continue productizing the patient experience by building things like instant booking and calendar management. As for any marketplace, Brandon shares that it requires a certain amount of supply-side adoption before they can get calendar access, etc
• Moreover, Power is also excited to start launching more product experiences for the supply side of the marketplace: tools that make researchers’ lives easier and help them manage their trials on the platform.

Go-to-market strategy: finding your audience

Find your unique insight and angle in the space.

• As Brandon and his team were researching the clinical trial space, they realized that by and large, people were building for pharma companies. Pharma companies are the obvious customers because they have the budget for life sciences R&D, etc.

“All the startup writing out there tells you to focus on the customer, the person who pays, and build for them. That’s what everyone has done. It’s been very logical.

The thing that I think everybody has missed is that the patients who participate in the clinical trials are the most important actors in the system.”

• When the team spotted this gap, they decided to become the go-to place for patients looking to learn more about clinical trials. By building for and having a relationship with patients, this gave them the opportunity to actually have an impact on the R&D life cycle for pharma companies.

Brandon’s insights on building from a patient perspective vs. pharma perspective:

• From a pharma-centric lens, you could throw more advertising dollars at the problem, try to recruit more patients through social media and cold call them into oblivion. Building from a patient-centric lens requires a strategic decision to focus on a non-paying user, which is counterintuitive. But Power’s belief is that by empowering patients they will build leverage in the system

“There’s a misunderstanding amongst the general public that people do clinical trials for money… When it comes to patients rather than healthy volunteers, people are largely not financially motivated.”

Solving the cold start problem depends on the dynamics of each marketplace.

“In any given marketplace, you have to decide — how are you going to get supply? How are you going to get demand and what order should you do it in?”

• Brandon shares that in the space of clinical trials, patients are the most important actors in the system and therefore that’s where they began building their initial thesis. The thing that they initially decided to do was not to focus on supply (which would be the pharma companies providing trials) and rather, focus on proving that they could bring patients in who are already interested in clinical trials. Now that they’ve proven the demand is there, they now have a reason to have conversations with these pharma companies.

It’s okay if you feel like you’re not making progress, just make sure you have a system in place to push yourself.

The earliest stages of building something are necessarily ambiguous. It’s important to define a build process and accountability structures for yourself. Brandon shares that he’s seen other folks spend a very long time feeling like they’re not making progress.

The pharma tech space

“The next 20 years of life sciences and biology could look like the last 20 years of the internet, but only if we do something about the clinical trial process.”

• Brandon believes that the AI-driven candidate discovery progress is super interesting. There’s new innovations that allow us to understand the world of different candidate therapeutics and quickly model out whether or not they may have an effect.

Interested in joining Power’s team?

• They’re hiring engineering talent and business development on the pharma side (job page). Overarchingly, they’re looking for people who are mission-oriented and want to work in a team that values agency, pragmatism, urgency, and selflessness.

If you prefer to listen to the full episode, listen here! Interested in learning more about Power or joining their team? Learn more on their website, LinkedIn, and careers page.