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Dr. Jeff Chen, a physician scientist, was pained by the pharma-model. He wanted to unlock democratized medicines that were effective, affordable, and didn’t require a doctor’s prescription. Upon graduating from medical school, he led first-of-its-kind clinical trials on natural products at UCLA. However, he grew frustrated at how slow and expensive traditional trials were, which made them only available to patentable, pharmaceutical drugs.
When nearly all traditional trials came to a halt due to COVID, that was the last straw. He acted on his vision of leveraging technology and social connectivity to make clinical trials automated, virtual, faster, larger scale, more diverse and affordable than ever before – all for his mission to validate non-pharmaceuticals and fix a broken healthcare system.
He courageously broke with tradition, put his medical and academic career on the line, and left UCLA to risk it all on an audacious idea that everyone in healthcare said was “impossible!” And that is how Radicle Science was born.
Radicle Science was created to continue clinical research at a time when the world needed easier and faster generation of clinical data. Dr. Jeff built an entirely new clinical trial model that allows research to be fully functional even in the midst of a pandemic. As the cofounder and CEO of Radicle Science, he revolutionized the entire clinical trial approach, including:
- Eliminating physical infrastructure
- Delivering study products directly to participants
- Collecting all study data virtually
- Automating previously manual research processes
- Deploying standardized study protocols
- Unblinding participants and providing personalized reports at the end of the study
With this approach, Dr. Jeff reduced the cost of gold standard double-blind randomized placebo controlled trials (RCTs) by almost two orders of magnitude, while reducing the timeline to completion by almost one order of magnitude.
The result is completely revolutionized, democratized clinical trials that allow medical research to be conducted at unprecedented scale, affordability, speed, and diversity. For the first time in history, non-pharmaceuticals can easily access clinical trials.
His research model is powered by AI-driven, virtual, direct-to-consumer, automated, standardized, randomized controlled trials. This next-generation approach also allows better inclusion of women, minorities, and rural populations - all while generating some of history’s first rigorous outcome data on non-prescription products used by hundreds of millions.
Since launching operations in the summer of 2021, Radicle has already studied over 20,000 diverse individuals across genders, ethnicities, and geographies in gold standard double blind randomized placebo controlled trials. Our clients now range from innovative startups to global CPG companies with +$100B market caps.
Most importantly, Dr. Jeff is leading Radicle Science to solve the long-lamented weakness of traditional pharma clinical trials: most of the people in these trials are caucasian males living in metropolitan areas. A vast majority of Americans do not fit these characteristics, and thus the findings from traditional trials don’t apply to most of the population!
This is why Radicle is bringing much needed equity into medical research. Our large-scale, virtual trials involve women, minorities, and rural populations who have been largely excluded from traditional clinical research. The unprecedented scale and reach of our intentionally diverse clinical trials finally enables inclusion of broad ethnicities, genders, age groups, and lifestyles - which moves all of us closer to personalized medicine.
As Dr. Jeff’s research model enables objective data generation at scale, Radicle Science is changing the entire healthcare paradigm, empowering consumers, doctors, insurers, healthcare systems, manufacturers, investors, brands, regulators, and retailers to make evidence-based health and business decisions for the first time around non-pharmaceuticals.
In his job postings, Dr. Jeff took inspiration from his hero, Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, paraphrasing his advertisements for expeditions. He wrote, ”The work will be hard, and safety is not guaranteed, but if we succeed, we will permanently alter the course of medicine for all future generations.”
Dr. Jeff hopes to impact generations to come by transforming unpatentable non-pharmaceutical products into proven personalized democratized medicines.
Nomination Title: Dr. Jeff Chen
