How we designed the survey and the peer-reviewed evidence behind pragmatic clinical trials.
Pragmatic clinical trials test treatments in real-world healthcare settings using existing medical records and routine care, rather than creating expensive artificial research environments.
The landmark RECOVERY trial at Oxford University demonstrated this approach at scale: it enrolled 40,000+ patients across 176 NHS hospitals, identified effective COVID-19 treatments months ahead of traditional trials, and did so at lower cost per patient.
RECOVERY is estimated to have saved over 1 million lives worldwide by rapidly identifying that dexamethasone reduces COVID mortality by one-third.
At the current rate of ~15 diseases per year receiving a first effective treatment, finding treatments for all ~6,650 currently untreatable diseases would take an estimated years.
Scaling pragmatic trials with additional funding would increase clinical trial capacity by , compressing that timeline to approximately years.
Pragmatic trials cost a fraction of traditional trials by using existing healthcare infrastructure.
Scaling pragmatic trials compresses the disease eradication timeline from years to years.
RECOVERY's identification of dexamethasone as an effective treatment saved over 1 million lives globally.
Pragmatic designs deliver actionable results in months, while traditional trials can take 5-10 years.