About
A pre-screening tool,
built for the patient in the chair.
Trial Beacon connects cancer patients to clinical trials they may actually be eligible for, using verified health-record data accessed with the patient’s consent. It is free, built for patients rather than pharma, and architected so that personal health data never leaves the device.
The problem
A matching problem,
not a supply one.
Eighty percent of clinical trials are delayed or closed because they can’t find enough participants. At the same time, patients — especially cancer patients — are actively looking for trials and can’t find the right ones. The two groups are looking for each other and missing.
Existing patient-facing tools ask you to fill out a questionnaire. You have to remember your diagnoses, guess at your lab values, and misremember medication names. The matches that come back are low-quality: false hope about trials you don’t qualify for, or silence about trials you do.
Existing provider-facing tools sell to hospitals. They need IT departments, contracting cycles, and executive buy-in. They surface trials to physicians, not to you. Unless your hospital has signed the right deal, they are invisible to you entirely.
A standard called SMART on FHIR changes this. It lets a patient authorize a third-party app to read their own health records — the real diagnoses, the real lab values, the real medication history — directly from their MyChart. No hospital IT department required. That is the unlock Trial Beacon is built on.
Core beliefs
Six principles
that decide the rest.
When a design, engineering, or product choice is ambiguous, we settle it by returning to these.
The patient is the user.
Not physicians. Not hospital administrators. Not pharma sponsors. Every interface choice is evaluated through one lens: does this help a cancer patient find and understand their options?
Honesty over optimization.
We will never tell a patient they qualify for a trial when we are not sure. We will never hide a no-match result behind vague language. If a criterion cannot be evaluated from a health record, we say so — and we send the patient to their oncologist with a specific question in hand.
Pre-screening, not diagnosis.
Trial Beacon is a filter, not an oracle. Our job is to help a patient narrow thousands of trials down to a handful worth discussing with a doctor. The final determination of eligibility always belongs to the investigator.
Privacy by architecture, not by policy.
The matching engine runs in your browser, in memory, and the data is discarded when the session ends. Patient health data never touches our servers. This is a structural property of the system, not a promise we are asking you to trust.
No paywall on hope.
The app is free for patients. No subscription, no premium tier, no unlock-more-matches. We will figure out sustainability later. Cancer patients searching for trials are not a monetization opportunity.
Make the science legible.
Trial protocols are written by researchers for regulators. They are not written for patients. Every trial in Trial Beacon should be understandable by a non-medical person — and if the original text is dense, an AI explainer can translate any section into plain language without ever seeing your health data.
What it isn’t
Said plainly,
in four lines.
- Not a diagnostic tool.
- We do not interpret patient data to make clinical claims.
- Not a replacement for a doctor.
- We pre-screen and inform. The investigator and care team make decisions.
- Not a B2B product.
- We do not sell to hospitals. Hospital involvement is not required to use this.
- Not a data broker.
- We do not store, sell, or monetize patient health data.
V1 scope
What’s in,
and what’s next.
Today
- All oncology trials, every cancer type.
- Epic MyChart integration, the largest US patient portal.
- Responsive web app, usable from any device.
- Browse with filters, search, and plain-language summaries.
- Personalized matching via MyChart, three-bucket model.
- Location filtering to find trials near you.
On the roadmap
- Other EHR systems beyond Epic.
- AI follow-up questions to fill data gaps.
- Fit ranking beyond met / not-met / discuss.
- Condition areas beyond oncology.
- Native mobile apps.
One last thing
If a trial can’t be evaluated from your record, we will tell you so — and point you toward your care team with a specific question to ask. That is the honest answer, and the useful one.