Ten years ago, my father was diagnosed with glioblastoma. It is a brain cancer with an average life expectancy of about ten months.
I became his advocate. I collected his records from every office that held a piece of them. I sat with reports I could not read and asked questions I did not know how to ask. I made phone call after phone call. Eventually I got him into a clinical trial.
He is still alive today.
I have thought about that outcome for ten years, and what I keep coming back to is this: he did not survive because he was luckier than other patients. He survived in part because someone in his family had the time, the stubbornness, and the flexibility to spend months learning a system that was never designed to be learned by families.
Most patients do not have that person. That is the problem I built Pathi to solve.
What Pathi is
Pathi is a free tool that helps people with cancer understand their own medical information and find clinical trials they may qualify for.
It is not a hospital, a clinic, or a replacement for your care team. It does not treat anyone or give medical advice. It is a place to keep your information in one spot, understand what it means, and see what research studies exist for a situation like yours.
It was built for patients and for the family members helping them, because in my experience those two people are often doing the same job.
Why clinical trials are hard to find
There are thousands of cancer clinical trials running in the United States at any given time. The information about them is public. Anyone can look it up.
The problem is that the information is written for researchers. A single trial listing can run for pages, in language that assumes you already know what it means. Eligibility rules are written as long lists of medical criteria. Finding the handful of studies relevant to one person means reading through an enormous amount of material that was never meant for patients.
Fewer than one in twenty adults with cancer takes part in a clinical trial. That is not because patients are unwilling. Around 70 percent of people with cancer say they would consider a trial if one were available to them. The gap between those two numbers is not about willingness. It is about access.
Who gets left out, and why
Here is the part that does not get said often enough.
More than 80 percent of people with cancer in this country are diagnosed and treated at community practices, close to home, by doctors they already know. Most clinical trials are run somewhere else, at large academic cancer centers.
That difference shows up in the numbers. At the major research centers, roughly one in five patients enrolls in a treatment trial. At community cancer programs, it is closer to one in twenty-five. Same disease, same willingness, very different odds, decided largely by which building you walk into.
The pattern repeats along other lines. Black Americans make up about 15 percent of people with cancer but only about 4 to 6 percent of participants in cancer treatment trials. Hispanic Americans are about 13 percent of people with cancer and about 3 to 6 percent of trial participants. People in rural areas, people in lower income neighborhoods, and older adults are all underrepresented as well.
None of that is because these patients said no. Most were never asked. Trials were not offered where they get care, the information was never put in front of them in a language or a form they could use, or the nearest study site was a two-hour drive on a workday they could not afford to lose.
This matters for two reasons. It means individual patients miss treatments that might have helped them. And it means the research itself is built on a group of people who do not look like the people who actually have cancer, which affects how well the results apply to everyone else.
We cannot fix all of that with an app. Trials still have to exist near you, and someone still has to run them. But one piece of this is an information problem, and information problems can be worked on. If you can find out in an afternoon which studies might fit your situation, you can walk into your next appointment already knowing what to ask about. That changes who gets to have the conversation at all.
How the matching works
You start by telling Pathi about your diagnosis, and the easiest way is to let a document do most of the work. Take a photo of something from your care team, like a pathology report, and Pathi
reads it and fills in what it finds. If your report runs several pages, you can photograph all of them.
Then you see everything it pulled out, in a list, before any of it is saved. You correct anything that is wrong and confirm your cancer type yourself, because that one matters too much to be assumed. After that, Pathi only asks you for the things it still does not have.
If you do not have a document handy, or you would rather just type, you can enter everything by hand instead. That option is always there.
From there, Pathi compares your information against the national registry of clinical trials. It looks at things like your cancer type, your stage, any biomarkers or genetic markers in your records, and where you live.
Then it shows you the studies that look like a possible fit, and explains each one in plain language: what the study is testing, what would be asked of you, and where it is located.
One thing I want to be direct about. A match on Pathi means a study looks like a possible fit based on the information you have entered. It is not confirmation that you are eligible. Only the research team running a study can determine that, and they will ask questions Pathi cannot. Think of a match as a starting point for a conversation with your doctor or with the study team, not as an answer.
What to expect when you use it
Pathi is free for patients. Signing up takes a few minutes.
You do not have to fill in everything at once. If you upload a document, most of it is filled in for you and you only answer what is left. If you type it in yourself, you can start with just your cancer type and add more later. The more complete your information, the more useful the matches, but nothing has to be finished in one sitting.
Every explanation is written in plain language, and you can have any section read aloud to you. Everything is available in Spanish.
You can also share your profile with a family member or caregiver, which matters if the person doing the research is not the person in treatment.
Nothing is behind a paywall. Trial matching in particular will always be free. A patient looking for a clinical trial should never hit a payment screen.
Your privacy
Your health information belongs to you.
Pathi is built to meet HIPAA standards. Your information is encrypted, both when it is stored and when it moves. It is not sold, and it is not shared with anyone unless you specifically choose to share it.
If you decide you want a research site to know about you, that only happens when you take that action yourself, for that specific study. Nothing about you goes anywhere without you deciding it should. You can request that your information be deleted at any time.
Our full privacy policy is available at pathihealth.com and explains this in more detail, including the technology partners that help operate the platform.
Why this matters to me
My father got a chance because someone was able to fight for him. That should not be what decides it.
If you have cancer, or you are the person helping someone who does, you should be able to find out in an afternoon whether a study exists that might help. Not after months of phone calls. Not only if you happen to have a family member with the time to learn a system.
That is what we are building. If you try it and something does not work, or something is confusing, tell us. Patients who have written to us have changed the product more than anything else has.
Paul Evans Founder, Pathi Health
