A platform to disrupt and democratize health research — this is how Quantified Citizen describes itself. And with over 19,000 participants taking part in their ongoing study, it seems that they might be doing just that.
Quantified Citizen is an app and digital platform that allows researchers to access large numbers of participants for a variety of studies, while simultaneously giving people the opportunity to self-examine and participate in potentially important research and preclinical work.
We sat down with Eesmyal Santos-Brault, founder and CEO of Quantified Citizen, to discuss the world’s largest study on microdosing and the future of digital research.
Quantified Citizen is a mobile health research platform where you can easily put together a study that can be used for a clinical trial or an observational study, or direct to consumer product market research, and then deploy that study natively to a mobile app. We then recruit participants who are engaged in the topic of the study. And so it’s kind of a two-studded marketplace, one for the researchers who are the customers, and the other is the consumers, the participants who participate in studies.
So we’re kind of crowdsourcing research data for studies? Will this ease access for researchers? Getting a study going, accessing data points from hundreds or thousands of participants, is a costly endeavor. And that kind of reduces the velocity of research. This is going to help researchers get access to data a bit more easily.
Yeah, absolutely. There are several problems that our product solves and one is around just the speed and the cost and all the inefficiencies that are involved in traditional research. It’s so expensive to run clinical trials, and there’s a lot of labor involved and so much of it can be automated, or done through software, so just simply having one platform that can support and decentralize clinical trials is already a step in the right direction and massive efficiency in time and money.
Being able to directly collect information from patients and participants through their mobile phones. Patient-reported outcomes, but also we collect wearable data as well so we can collect the biometric information that can support the studies, do cognitive tests, things like that add a lot of valuable data to the data set. So preclinical data is one part that we’re solving.
The second part is around just finding participants. The recruitment side. It’s a big challenge and there are huge companies out there whose whole business model is recruitment of participants to match for studies. That’s the other side of the platform — growing this really large participant base. Not just participants that are diverse and interested in these topics, but who are engaged. So when a client comes to us with a study that they want to do. Let’s say it’s a study on, for example, 250 Latin American women with Crohn’s disease in a certain state in the US. Well, we can query our database and say yes, we have 315 and of those 275 are actively engaged, with existing preclinical data like existing mental health assessments etc.
So we’re building a database of highly engaged participants that can be easily deployed to match a variety of studies.
These are user-reported data points, so I’m guessing you’re trying to implement as many things as possible to have the data be valid for the wider research community? You mentioned tap tests for cognitive abilities and other standard testing already used in traditional research?
Yes exactly. In order to actually contribute to research you need to be using existing assessments and tests that have already been validated out there and have literature around that to support it. So our whole platform has a library of validated assessments from self-reported assessments, to clinician-administered assessments, to cognitive tests. So you think about them like Lego blocks, you can drag and drop, create your own protocol for your study and then deploy it and use all these validated tests and then get valid data on the output.
Interesting stuff. With psychedelics inspiring a reassessment of traditional modes of therapy, it seems reasonable to review and expand our methods of data-gathering and patient participation. Check out the full interview below.
