Reflecting on our Why
For the past few months, our leadership team has been working hard to align our operating strategy further with our mission statement: “Impactful medical breakthroughs for everyone, with everyone.” Over nine years, we’ve been working toward this mission, no doubt. We just feel like it’s time that we can kick things up a gear. We have a lot of great talent, a culture that brings in great people from around the world, and what we’re doing is working for patients and clients (we’ll be sharing more of these metrics in future posts). We feel like there’s no time better than the present to reflect on how we’re doing what we’re doing and how we can evolve.
We arrived at the realization that Leapcure’s approach to clinical trials is EQuitable—integrating both equity and emotional intelligence for research. Our successes came not from simply identifying patients that met a checklist of items, but by rolling up our curiosity sleeves, spending time learning about each journey from patients, study staff and getting us all to a win-win-win. We’ve turned away from the easy path many times, embracing the challenges that come with making a real difference for all stakeholders. We take the time to learn why patients of all backgrounds might look to us for support and what’s underneath. We make the effort to put ourselves in the shoes of research site staff and complement their clinical research endeavors. Feedback on our work has been that it’s been categorically different to patient recruitment. We’ve been on path to creating a new category of clinical trials businesses without knowing it.
Creating EQuitable Clinical Trials
To make clinical trials EQuitable is to make them fair, accessible, and with space for all voices to be heard. EQ (w/ capital Q) stands for the empathy and emotional intelligence that goes into building trusted connections with each person on an individual level. Our patient recruitment work has become just an element of what we do as a company, it’s become what is only because of the trusted connections we make and it’s just one element of EQuitable clinical trials (we’ll be sharing more of these elements in future posts too). EQuitable has a lot to do with who we are, what we stand for, and speaks closely to our mission.
The EQuitable work we’ve done so far has led to outcomes that we could have never anticipated. To me this business has felt like we are “playing with house money”, the impact of this business has generated rewards beyond what I imagined already. After being part of saving thousands of lives, ensuring diverse representation in COVID vaccine research, helping numerous treatments make it to market, and often being the difference between clinical trials completing vs. not across hundreds of studies, we’re still committing to doing more. We are in an industry where there’s always so much more to do particularly with diverse representation. We’ve also learned that we’re capable of making a difference. So why not us be part of initiating a key evolution for clinical trials? For example, we had a double-digit number of Key Opinion Leader (KOL) Physicians take the time to co-market with us just last quarter—no compensation involved. Here’s us with one of them on Bloomberg TV. Most of these KOLs don’t have spare time, but they made time – and for a startup clinical research vendor. We’re just scratching the surface.
Where Next?
Getting after the EQuitable Category will require us to take things up by more than just one gear. Our plans for this are almost uncomfortably ambitious:
- Achieve better patient outcomes due to more robust and reliable data.
- Achieve broader patient and physician trust in treatments.
- Achieve better economic value for sponsors as broader treatment impact and risks will be known—pricing in known impact, pricing out underlying risks.
- Lead a movement to enable faster FDA/global regulatory prioritization when clinical trials are EQuitable.
We’ll be sharing more of our short-term and long-term plans soon. As we move forward, we’re focusing on much more than just patient recruitment—it’s only one element of our EQuitable Clinical Trials category approach. We’ll be looking beyond the traditional metrics of clinical trial success to truly empower patient communities and further our impact with KOLs. In alignment with our mission, we aim to cultivate partnerships that not only enhance patient empowerment but also solidify our place in the EQuitable clinical trials category. Our journey is about more than just evolving; it’s about setting a precedent for meaningful change in the industry. Stay tuned as we continue to redefine clinical trials with a focus on equity and empathy.
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