Matevž Ambrožič
Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another episode of PharmaLinea’s podcast. My name is Matevž Ambrožič, and I’m the Marketing Director at PharmaLinea, and I’m super happy to be joined here today by Ms. Pelin Thorogood, the Co-Founder and Executive Chairwoman of Radicle Science.
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Thank you so much for having me.
Matevž Ambrožič
Thank you, Pelin, for joining us. I’m very excited to have Pelin here today because of the really exciting business model that the company that she founded has. We’ll dive more into the details of that later. But I actually met Pelin last summer. It was at the French event Nutriform Business Days, a very pleasant event in itself, but it was made even more pleasant by meeting Pelin. She was giving a great talk, a great presentation at the event, and I just had to stop by and say hi to her.
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Amazing. It was, you definitely were a highlight. I really enjoyed meeting you there as well. Thank you so much for having me again, it’s lovely.
Matevž Ambrožič
Likewise. And I’m assuring the listeners today it’s worth joining in. The presentation she had, Pelin had at the event just made a big mark on me and I think what you’re about to hear in this podcast will also be very interesting for you, the audience, because most of you are dealing with clinically substantiated nutraceuticals. So this is really, I think, a very, very good fit for our audience today. So, obviously, I didn’t reveal yet too much about their business model and I’m going to let Pelin do that. But there is a natural affinity between our company’s interests and Radicle Science because those of you who know us know we’re all about clinical substantiation in nutraceuticals, but we wouldn’t honestly host just any clinical research company, clinical research organization on this podcast. We’re hosting the co-founder of Radicle Science because Radicle Science, in my view, and I think you will share this view, has a really, really exciting new way of doing things and not just that, but I think they are moving, are really creating strides towards moving the industry in the right direction. It’s not just new and exciting in terms of the business opportunity that it creates, but it’s really, I think in the end, good also for the consumers. It’s driving a very positive trend. I think it’s making clinical trials, in my view, more accessible. But that’s, I’m going too far now. So, this is the reason, and I hope at the end of this podcast for those of you who have doubts still about clinical trials and the investment that they present and how worth it is, if it is worth it at all to invest in this or is it more prudent to spend all that for the marketing without the substantiation. Of course, I’m already shedding light on which way we’re leaning over here, obviously with the choice of guest as well. I hope with today’s podcast to try to remove some of those doubts and try to substantiate the answer with some specific case studies that Pelin might share with us. That’s what you’re in for today and let’s dive right in. And I’d like to first ask Pelin about, that’s my natural first question: how did Radicle Science come to be? Where did you think of this business model and how you personally got there? What brings a person’s professional career to founding a company like Radicle Science?
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Matevž, first of all, thank you so much for that very kind introduction. Everything you said and in terms of what we’re about to do is good and I think I’m going to even share some additional fun things that may even be more than what you talked about. And your question about how we came about here is so timely because I just posted on LinkedIn yesterday about we’ve had our five year anniversary, sort of, like I said on LinkedIn, because it was the ideation. Like when Dr. Jeff Chen, my co-founder and I, in the early days of COVID started talking about Radicle Science. So the company is basically 5 years old from an idea perspective and four and a half years old in terms of starting the company perspective. So this is a really timely episode. But, let’s start at the beginning in terms of how I got here. My background is data science, operations, research, information engineering. That’s what I went to school for. I got my bachelor’s and master’s at Cornell and then got into the world of data and analytics, which obviously has been pretty exciting over the last 20 years or so. My focus was in tech, leveraging data, complex data sets, large data sets, multi-channel data sets, to be able to make sense out of them to drive better business decisions at the time. I was the CMO of a company that went public and really kind of defined the market space. Then I was CEO of one of the earlier predictive analytics companies so that we can leverage data not just to see what happened, but what might happen going forward. Really exciting times. I love data and I love being able to understand what we can actually do with it, so we can actually make much, much better decisions. But in terms of how I got here was after I sold my last company, we had a family health crisis. It was a good time for me to kind of focus and see, okay, I’ve been working non-stop, we have to focus on family. And at the same time realizing there’s a lot we need to do on the healthcare side of things. I wanted to bring my background in data not just to business data but to health data as well. So I started funding clinical trials as a philanthropist and then I was really surprised, because it was not an area I had really put any focus on, how slow and expensive clinical trials were. But more importantly for me, as the data girl as I call myself, how homogeneous and how small these data sets were. They were not predictive of what things can be because they’re very small. They were, because they’re homogeneous, they were not really generalizable to the population at large and they were certainly not going to be able to drive precision wellness or precision healthcare. 10 years prior I was doing precision marketing, I mean your background, right? If we can do precision marketing with these data sets, if we just had the right data set, can we not actually improve and go towards precision medicine? So that was really what was in my heart, and…
Matevž Ambrožič
If I might just jump in, sorry…
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Of course, please do. There’s just so much here and I want to talk about how I met Jeff, but please ask whatever you’d like to ask.
Matevž Ambrožič
Right. So this was approximately five, or was it 10 years ago when this started brewing and you started analyzing clinical studies, and this was specifically in nutraceuticals, I mean in food supplements?
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Yes. So around 2017 is when I started funding clinical trials. I started a nonprofit to do so with another philanthropist friend. That’s when it started. That’s about when I met Dr. Jeff Chen who was, he’s an MD and he’s a MD turned scientist and he has started the first botanicals clinical trial lab at UCLA, which is where he had finished med school. So that’s kind of how we met in 2017. That’s not when we started Radicle, but that’s when we became friends and disillusioned colleagues I would say, given we were not happy with how things were being done. Because the entire model, honestly, was designed for pharma, designed for products that could actually be patented, so they could afford these long, you know, expensive trials. But they were clearly not accessible to the types of products that we focus on today, especially PharmaLinea or what I wanted to focus on myself, and things that are accessible to everyone, things that we can just go buy from the drugstore to improve wellness. They were there for sick care versus improving wellness.
Matevž Ambrožič
Right? So you weren’t working at all professionally within the wellness industry. This was an insight you had without being professionally involved in food supplements?
Pelin Wood Thorogood
That is correct. Until 2017, I was literally a tech CEO focused on data and making sense out of data. It’s that health crisis that made me focus on this, and that’s when I realized I could bring my background in data. Of course partnering with the right science people to be able to actually create the kind of change that I thought this industry needed.
Matevž Ambrožič
I think that’s really a fantastic insight that you had, if I might lay on a couple of compliments on you, because I think working in the industry you would understand that there’s a need for this and even then, rarely people would move and create something of their own to satisfy this need. But seeing it from the outside, I think that’s a very, very keen eye you have.
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Thank you, thank you so much. I think it’s, again, data people are about patterns, right? And when you see something and you see that it’s not being done and you go to the root cause, first principles, why can’t we do it this way? Because it’s been done this way, pharma needed it a certain way, it was never designed for a certain industry. Yet, as you know, I’m in the US and like 80% of Americans use supplements and other, food as medicine is a huge trend and yet we are not actually studying them and we’re putting a lot of effort into pharma. By the way, I’m not at all anti-farma. I think we should absolutely develop those drugs and help with sick care, but we should put the same kind of effort into wellcare, and that’s really what I’m focused on.
Matevž Ambrožič
Very well put. So, moving on to the next steps chronologically. So you met Dr. Jeff, how did it go from there?
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Jeff was doing amazing clinical trials at UCLA but also he was very frustrated because these things were taking forever, and that the trials are smaller size. Certain products especially in those days, being in California, as you know, cannabis is legal, except that to study it, it takes a year. But if you want to go purchase it, you can go buy it at the dispensary. So there was this, people could go buy it but we were unable to study these compounds that people were using every day. There were a lot of things that did not make sense in terms of how people were using natural products, functional mushrooms. There were really no studies on them. We were looking at this world like we’re not studying them, yet everybody is using them and is this really the right way to treat society? And then, of course, COVID came, and actual physical clinical trials kind of stopped because of everything that we all collectively experienced. So, that’s really when that first phone call came and Jeff and I started talking in late April, basically saying well obviously we have a bit more time on our hands given a lot of things have stopped. We have also been frustrated and we’ve been good colleagues, had spoken about some of these issues together at many conferences before and we realized we had a common passion and very complimentary backgrounds. So, we basically start about – isn’t there a better way. And that conversation, that first conversation led to nearly daily chats. Jeff left UCLA. We basically decided to start Radicle Science and even the name is very much a testament to what we’re looking to do. The way we spell »radicle« really means like the first root of a plant and we wanted to really focus on natural products. And of course, the way »radicle« sounds is about doing something different, doing something really outside the norm that is being done and science is what we’re rooted in. So, we would decide to start Radicle Science late summer and by November 2020 we had our very first employee and we had formed a public-benefit corporation with a mission to create the future of proven personalized wellness accessible for all, similar to how you started that conversation because we wanted to have that access. We want to be able to provide wellness, make sure there’s proof behind it so that we don’t go and wonder is this going to work and more importantly is this going to work for my unique body and condition. So that has been our goal from day one.
Matevž Ambrožič
And has this goal been more specifically oriented? Did you have in mind, in the beginning, more ingredients, more finished products or was it actually irrelevant?
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Well, at the end, we need all of them, right? We need to be able to study all of them. But at the end of the day, to me we have to be consumer-centric because, again, our goal is to improve proven personalized wellness accessible for all. Which means that finished products have to be proven. A finished product has ingredients, a combination of ingredients, has certain dosages, has a product form that there’s a delivery method associated with it. So it’s not just even if a specific ingredient in it is proven, which you would like that to be as well, because that’s how you start your formulation, that’s really a little bit higher up in the supply chain. So to me, we want to be able to understand how different ingredients work and what dosages may actually work differently for different people, which we’re going to get there because personalization is huge for me. But then at the end of the day, I think the combined finished product is very, very important because that’s what as consumers we take. That’s what we have to purchase. Make sure that it works for me, you know, as a woman at my age with my lifestyle, coffee drinking habits, whatever it may be. And all of these things actually do make a difference, or for you.
Matevž Ambrožič
Exactly.
Pelin Wood Thorogood
All of these things are important.
Matevž Ambrožič
Very much so. Ingredient level studies are the basis that help many formulators. Here I mean studies on standardized ingredients where we know exactly what’s the amount of the active compound, that is always the same extraction process, if it’s a botanical and so forth and that’s a good basis. But the real life situation is a person consuming a finished product where there’s a combination of ingredients, there’s also the medium if we’re talking about liquids, if we’re talking about gummies it’s all very much different. This is what we always explain with clinical substantiation, ingredients are a good start, but the reality is, everybody I think should, in an ideal world, have a clinical study on the finished product. I think it’s, of course, there is a long way to get there. But I think it’s an ideal we should strive towards that. Of course, it’s a prerequisite, just for maybe if somebody’s listening that who is not exactly from the industry, maybe from the pharma industry. It’s a prerequisite for pharma products obviously but in the food supplement space it’s very much not and it’s very much not the standard. So, there is a growing, I think, number of products that have clinical studies on the actual finished formulation but it’s a limited amount, I would say. And companies like Radicle Science, I hope, are going to gradually change the situation.
Pelin Wood Thorogood
On that point I just wanted to kind of double click on what you said on the ingredients. That’s super important because it is about the traceability and the consistency, because if we cannot count on the ingredients and understand how they’re going to be, then it’s like basically you cannot just focus on the finished product right? So, it’s important to understand the ingredients, making sure that it’s going to be the same kind of consistency, the same kind of potency and things like that. But at the end of the day, because the consumer focuses on the finished product, it’s really ensuring you have the right ingredients coming in, in the right combination, in the right delivery method. So, it’s really all of the above. It’s not one or the other.
Matevž Ambrožič
Yes, correct. I just made a mental note before when you were talking about the name, funny story and this is true, I swear. I mistakenly, sorry about that, Pelin, but mistakenly in one of our first emails, typed »radicle« as in »R-A-D-I-C-A-L« in the email. And I kid you not, I think it’s just Outlook is becoming more and more intelligent, but it corrected me automatically. »Radicle«, spelled it the right way. It might have been the history or Outlook just knows somehow you’re famous enough that this really happened.
Pelin Wood Thorogood
That’s amazing! Because the other version, the »C-A-L« version is obviously much more common. So, the fact that it corrected you to this actually correct word in English but less common, because a lot of people actually get confused and we did this on purpose. It was a play on words for us. But wow, okay. I need to share this with Jeff, this is really fun.
Matevž Ambrožič
Yeah, Outlook knows, it’s a milestone you just reached. You’re an established enough company for Outlook autocorrects to…
Pelin Wood Thorogood
I will let our marketing team know to actually use that one, it’s amazing.
Matevž Ambrožič
All right. So, we’re tiptoeing around the current business model as it is. I think it’s time to dive exactly into it.
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Basically, we enable companies, ingredient suppliers or brands with finished products to be able to have easy access to clinical evidence. We generate clinical evidence, very rigorous clinical evidence using double-blind placebo-controlled trials at unprecedented speed, scale, and affordability. So, it’s not about doing the old fashioned clinical trial, we all need rigorous evidence. But the reason we haven’t had access is because they’ve been expensive, they’ve been too slow, so it affects go-to-market. And the small scale of the studies really does basically makes it difficult to detect small effect sizes, which a lot of supplements are for. Maybe pharma products are for higher effect, but our wellness products are for small effect. The scale is really, really important for the precision and small effect size. What we do is enable clinical trials to actually deliver value to the wellness industry with affordability, with speed, so you can go to market and iterate and with the scale, so you can actually detect things and understand who your products may work for. Because at the end of the day, a lot of people realize that one size does not fit all, which since it doesn’t do that in life, it shouldn’t be surprising that the single pill doesn’t work for everyone the same way.
Matevž Ambrožič
If I can get concrete, this is in everybody’s mind. It’s not the easiest question, I’m sure, but if you can give us a ballpark of what the scale is in your mind when you’re talking about small populations, big populations, what are the populations that you’re working with or time frames as well?
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Of course, that’s actually an easy question, because we’re a very transparent company. For us, the smallest clinical trial we will do would be a two arm trial – one active product, one placebo, and the minimum size would be 500 people, so 250 people per arm. We go for diverse Americans, so we actually study American populations. In terms of the diversity, obviously, unless you’re studying women’s health and we only recruit women, but otherwise it’s half men, half women. We make sure there are appropriate age groups. Again, if we want to focus on specific age groups it’s very, very easy for us to do, but otherwise, we can actually go for the diversity of age. And, because they’re randomized, both active arm and placebo arm have very similar, say, behavioral habits, eating habits and things like that. And you run the study and from the time we get product from our partner, product and placebo from our partner, and everything else we do ourselves, to the time that they get their data back is 6 months. So that’s pretty fast.
Matevž Ambrožič
Okay. Now the question in everybody’s mind, how is that possible? Why, what is different in your model that allows this? Because this is, anybody who’s ever done a clinical trial, 6 months is the time you need to submit the documents to the ethical committee and maybe do something else and that’s it. How is this possible?
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Well, it’s magic. No, actually I use the word »magic« kind of facetiously and partially for real, because any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. There is that famous quote about that. We do it with technology, as well as pretty creative thinking. All of our primary protocols, whether it’s on sleep, anxiety, gut health, cognition, women’s health, libido, any of these things, we have primary IRB submissions that have already been approved. IRB being the ethical committee that you mentioned. Everything is actually done with human ethics approval. Everything is done with ClinicalTrials.gov registration. Everything is publishable and we publish all the time in very high-end publications. That portion is done, but the way we do it really is via technology. We have the first end-to-end, vertically integrated, fully automated clinical trial platform that has been developed. Basically everything is automated, from recruitment, from people coming in, from them going through consent, to being automatically randomized, stratified, being put into the various arms. Because we, of course, do many multi-arms trials, it’s not just active plus placebo. To engaging them through the trial and then once we have the data, once we’re getting the data, all of that goes into our common large Radicle repository, the data is actually organized. There’s a certain way we manage the data and analyze the data and in the end, of course, data scientists and biostatisticians look at the final version. But even what they get has been pre-analyzed at a level where they can actually put their expertise on versus actually deal with all the cleaning and things like that. There’s a ton of automation we’ve been able to put in over the last few years, which makes a process seamless, clean and also much more predictable. Because the more times you do things, especially leveraging technology, it’s almost like, think about an assembly line, right? When you’re creating cars, you can still configure and do a lot of things with the cars, but you have a lot of predictability versus you and I going to a garage and deciding let’s build a car today and it may not be so good, right? When you’re doing clinical trials as one-offs, it’s a lot less predictable. When you actually create this tech enabled platform, which has been, you’re running literally hundreds of clinical trials through it and tens of thousands of people through it. It becomes a lot more predictable and your results are going to be a lot stronger as well.
Matevž Ambrožič
I actually see a a parallel comparability to our business model of private label manufacturing, because there is a, in our case, there is a set of pre-developed formulations that you launch directly, that are ready to launch, and therefore you are quicker to the market. And here, is there a similar element where you have a set of predefined, to a certain extent, what kind of extent it is, you can maybe explain a little bit, but a set of pre-developed clinical trial protocols, am I getting this right?
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Yes, you are correct, except there’s a lot of configurability. At the end of the day, we’re focused on wellness, we’re not focused on pharma or disease, which actually… And then you look at the world of wellness. People buy products for sleep, anxiety, mood, cognition, libido, energy, women’s health like menstrual symptoms, menopause, gut health issues, all of these different things. There is a primary set of products, conditions, people actually purchase products for. And there are ways you can study them, both leveraging patient-reported outcomes that are validated questionnaires, as well as specific, both physical as well as digital biomarkers that you’d actually collect, and different things would be for different things. You may want to call it cortisol for stress and for sleep there are other things etc. The point is, there’s a preset number of things that should be between getting both the PRO data, the Patient-Reported Outcome data, and the biomarkers you’ll be able to combine. We have those set, but we can absolutely change and modify them and configure them, that again, that’s the beauty of technology. You don’t have to start from scratch, you can actually have things modular, which I’m sure you do things that way in your manufacturing facility as well, and then figure out exactly how your Lego pieces come together to be able to give the desired output to your client. If a client is focused on a cognition product for gamers, then you might want to focus on a different age group, for instance, right? Whereas, if you’re focused on a cognition product for premenopausal women, you’re probably going to get a different combination of things and maybe measuring different things. In all these cases, even though it’s cognition, you can still configure it to make sure you’re focusing on the right subpopulation. You’re focusing on the right indicators to ensure that you are detecting the effects that are desirable for the population you’re going to sell to.
Matevž Ambrožič
You mentioned now quite a few different health areas, indications, or studied effects even in populations. Are these all populations you’ve already done studies on? I’m kind of interested in the range of different things your company has studied so far in the trials.
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Everything I mentioned are things we do, some more than others. Sleep has been probably one of the ones that we have done the most, sleep and anxiety. Cognition is becoming very hot. Gut health is very, very hot. There are definitely areas where, and women’s health is, of course, especially menopause is becoming a very hot topic and we’re getting more and more interest. All of these are trials we’ve done multiple times and we’ve done it for specifically two different reasons as well. We have a lot of companies coming to us for R&D or innovation. They have formulations in mind and maybe different dosages, maybe to manage COGS and things like that. They may bring us multiple formulations, maybe with different ingredients or different dosages and then we have those multiple actives, on each of them are different arms as well as a placebo. Sometimes they want to see if the sleep formulation is going to do better than melatonin, which is kind of the product that a lot of people take out there. They may even put an active control in there versus a placebo control. We help them with innovation to make sure that one of the formulations at least is going to be working, beating placebo in a statistically significant way as well as providing clinically meaningful results. So, you’re looking for two things. You want to beat it statistically significantly so you can actually say it works, and also the effects are clinically meaningful, right? We make sure that is the case. Then the other reason is, a lot of people do come to us also, I have this finished product in market, but I really would like to make a claim on it. Those would be active versus placebo. We actually do both of those and I will talk more about it later, but we also, a lot of this data is super valuable for marketing, which I know you’re interested in as well.
Matevž Ambrožič
Absolutely. Could you perhaps, if we can get a little bit more specific with, so our listeners can really visualize or see how they could do a similar thing. Could you share with us maybe a specific case study of a specific client, if that’s possible, on how they came to you, why they came to you, what kind of study you did and then let’s move on to how they use the data, then how it helps them with their marketing, what kind of results it produces. Because everybody, I think, in theory would like to have clinically studied products. But, how can they justify it with their budgeting in front of their financial, or whoever is confirming their budgets.
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Absolutely. We work with, just in terms of clients, we work with from the smallest brands, some literally work with us to go to market, to some of the largest CPG brands out there. Between speed and affordability, both of them have desires to work with us. I’m going to start with an example of a company that actually went to market with us. They didn’t exist prior to us. And this was a company, it’s called MDbio. They were four amazing MDs and surgeons from Cedars, which is a top hospital in California. They were really looking for something other than pharmaceuticals to be able to help their patients after surgery, to be able to deal with sleep and things like that. Because Ambien and other things may knock you out, but they also have side effects, which we’re not going to go there. They were looking for some things and they came up with formulations, but they didn’t, being doctors and understanding clinical trials probably better than most of us, they didn’t want to just say, this looks really good, let me try it on friends and family and go to market, because sometimes that happens. They came to us and they came to us with two different formulations, pretty different. We did a three-arm trial for them with two formulations that they created that were very different and against placebo. Good thing they had two formulations, because one of them did not work and the other one did so well that it actually beat placebo across four different endpoints. Our trials, because they’re so large, I should have mentioned this earlier, we don’t just go after one end point. I highlighted the various areas we study, but many things are comorbid, they’re related, right? Sleep, anxiety and pain, and many other things may be related to it as well. In this case, they were going for a sleep study, but they saw that their product really worked well for anxiety, mood, and this overall general wellness as well. And it beat placebo with clinically meaningful outcomes across the board, this one formulation and the other one did not. Long story short, they were able to go to market with a clinically proven product that actually has all the data on their website. We were able to publish that clinical trial in Nutrients, in a well-respected peer-reviewed journal. Then they came back to us with an anxiety product afterwards, which also beat placebo and then they were able to also get that out to market. The older products that they’re actually taking to market are starting with formulations and seeing, which formulation beats placebo and then they go to market with a product they know works for the populations that they’re going after. The other really cool thing is, even though their product happens to be on average across all age ranges and genders etc. Because we do a lot of additional precision analysis, which we’re going to talk about, they were able to also understand which sub populations benefit specifically and which ones may not benefit as much. Because they sell through a lot of doctor channels as well, that extra data has provided them so much additional value, because the MDs they work with, they’re like oh, now I understand when I may want to recommend your products to which of my the patients, because I can actually put them into the right subpopulation, right cohort, and feel good about it’s going to work for this man that is 50 years old and it’s in the right population and things like that. It’s really helped them and we presented with them on multiple events together, because it’s such a cool unique story coming from four rockstar doctors.
Matevž Ambrožič
This is exactly the story that got me hooked at the French event where we met, and it was really cool to see. I was personally very impressed by the fact that a startup, a company that didn’t sell supplements before, invested in clinical trials to begin with, that they invested in clinical trials at all being a startup. But even more so impressive, because they invested in the clinical trial before even going to market. I think that’s a really, it seems like a more, let’s say risky investment, to initially, it seems at first glance. But in fact, I think that checking first that the product actually works and then launching and, of course, spending several thousands, maybe this is a good point to give a ballpark of the cost as well. You say you’re a transparent company. We haven’t mentioned this number as well yet. Could we just touch upon that briefly? What is a standard cost range of a standard trial or something like this?
Pelin Wood Thorogood
First of all, yes, I agree with you. To me, it would be far riskier to go to market not knowing if your product’s going to work, because you’re putting a lot of marketing dollars behind something. You’re launching it and you’re putting a lot of time and effort and resources outside of just dollars behind it. Why would you want to do that? Especially knowing what I know, when people come to us with multiple formulations. I assure you, not every formulation beats placebo. So, the point is, why would you want to do that? It’s not the right thing to do for business or for society. To me, yes, I think we should actually take to market products that we know work, and we should know who they work for, because not everything works for everyone. With that, in terms of the pricing, for a two arm, 500 person trial, that starts at around 120.000 USD and again, we give the data back around six months from the time we get, the only thing our clients need to do is create the product and placebo and send it to our warehouse. From that point on, we do everything from the blinding of those products, so people don’t know which is what and then recruiting and sending everything out. And then the time they get their results back is about six months. And then you can add additional arms, of course, because you want to study more formulations, you want to have an active control and all of these things, depending on the duration of the trial. Those would be anywhere from 30 – 50.000 USD to add additional arms, because some trials are longer, so you may need more people and things like that. There’s a lot of configurability and variations and our pricing sheet is very transparent in terms of how it all works.
Matevž Ambrožič
Thanks for that, Pelin, and thanks for the transparency. Just as a disclaimer, there is no commercial interest here. I’m talking about the pricing because it’s so relevant for the innovation in terms of the business model, because it is actually a big factor in making clinical trials more accessible, hopefully more prevalent and driving the industry forward. We’re talking about the pricing for a good reason, I think. And exactly what you said about risk management with marketing investments. I think, still, the typical way of thinking is we first need to confirm that this is a commercially viable product before we will invest in a clinical trial, but in fact I think marketing, as a marketeer it’s horrible to say this, but I think marketing can only go a certain way. It can only last, have an effect for a certain amount of time. If the product isn’t efficient to back it up, it is going to fade sooner or later. The product cannot be sustainably successful. You can invest in marketing campaigns for a while, but then you need the product to stick and work on itself with a certain amount of marketing encouragement, but still it has to function and create sustainable returns and that’s why it makes, in the end I think, in the long run, fiscal sense, financial sense to invest into clinical trials before launching, and even in product development as you mentioned with some of your cases, right?
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Matevž, on that note, actually, when we do our clinical trials, we don’t just collect health outcome data, which of course we do plenty of across lots of dimensions, including eating, exercise, coffee, drinking, all this stuff, so we actually understand these people really well, seeing how they may improve with the intervention that is being given. But, we also collect net promoter score data as well as willingness to pay data. You have a sense, on a blinded formulation, how people feel about this. To me, that’s such invaluable data from a blended perspective to a marketer. You have a sense of that before you even put your lovely packaging and amazing promotion and placement on it, right? I was the Chief Marketing Officer, I believe in marketing, but to me it’s an ant. You want to have really good marketing on a really good product that actually works and then you’ll have an absolute winner. You get it on the shelf, then you keep it on the shelf because it’s actually working for people. So, I think it’s a combination of both. There is no reason to have great products with bad marketing or products that, I have no idea if this works, let me put some amazing polish on it. That’s not going to last. So, you’re absolutely right. When you have both, then you have a winner.
Matevž Ambrožič
Correct. And do you know, for example MDbio, you mentioned they’re using this in their direct to consumer communication in website. Is there any other form or channel that they use this in? I mean, of course, this is very much different how one can use the clinical data from market to market, but I’m interested in the American case and MDbio specifically.
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Sure. They do direct-to-consumer, they also sell through clinics, which is, I mean, at the end of the day, they’re doctors, so they have that credibility, the data, the publication and that precision insights in terms of how the product »yay, it works« across the board. But also, I understand how it works for different subpopulations has been very helpful for them to be able to sell through doctors’ channels, because that data makes the health care professionals feel much more confident that this product is vetted, valid, and they understand how to recommend things like this to their patients.
Matevž Ambrožič
In different markets, we see now various ways… I mean typically, clinical data used to be, I think, back in the days more relevant, more obviously relevant for companies that did doctor detailing, pharmacist detailing, the classic, let’s say, pharmaceutical way of promoting products. But, nowadays I see more and more direct-to-consumer communication about clinicals either on websites, even directly on product packaging. I’ve seen direct mentions of clinical studies, even some graphs and so forth. Again, there are differences market-to-market how you can do this. But, also with the rise of medical professional influencers, I think medical data, I mean the clinical data is getting a new platform, where it can be much wider spread and gaining in relevance, and in usability in marketing in my view.
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Let me give you an example of that, of a company that more people will have heard about. MegaFood®, which you know, is a big US brand and they work with us to take to market their mushroom product for anxiety and it’s a reishi-mushroom/ashwagandha mix, it’s a proprietary blend. And, actually on the label, on the bottle, it’s not even on the website, it’s on the bottle, it actually says it’s clinically shown to help with anxiety. On their marketing, their website, their press releases they talked about how it’s the first and only clinically proven functional mushroom product to actually work for anxiety. So, they were able to really leverage for their marketing, because they have such good clinical proof behind it.
Matevž Ambrožič
You mentioned a couple of times already, the topic of sub populations and what works for you, doesn’t work for me necessarily. And how these large data sets that you have enable you to examine these subpopulations and potentially even that can be then used for even more precise marketing, right? How does that work? And can you give me specific examples of maybe how you’ve done that in studies and seen maybe that a certain sub population responds better to the product? How was it used in the marketing or anything in that direction?
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Absolutely. This is actually one of my favorite areas, just because it’s all about the fact that data gives us the ability to be far more precise. I have an aversion to the term average, even though it’s very useful in certain ways. None of us is average. The average US population, what does that even mean? The average US family has one and a half kids and half a dog or whatever. It’s not real, it’s a statistical construct, right? It doesn’t exist. We need to, at least, do subpopulations of similar people, so there’s more commonality between those people versus just doing this average between the top of the Himalayas and the ocean, and then you’re going to have some kind of middle ground, but that’s neither talking about the top of the mountains or the sea level. It’s really important to understand groups of areas so you’re able to understand meaningful, that data is going to be meaningful to a group versus a statistical average, that is not all that useful, perhaps outside of maybe census data. So, with that in mind, the fact that we had these very large and heterogeneous populations, very diverse populations enables us to not only analyze it on average, which we need to do because that’s a requirement. But then really apply a lot of awesome advanced biostatistics on it to understand how it works at the most basic level for men versus women, and then for women over 40 who may have menopausal symptoms versus women under 40 who… The point is, you start asking these questions and seeing how it works. You may find that a product that does not actually beat placebo, which happens on average, actually works really well for women and it’s just because the men, it did not do much for men at all, that on average it brought it down. You have an amazing women’s formula in your hands and you basically did not realize that. These are all examples of situations we have seen. We may find that the product actually works so well that it does not really be doing a whole lot for menstruating women but it’s actually making a huge difference for menopausal women. All of these data points are really, really interesting and these are massive subpopulations, we talk about gender or menstruation and things like that, or BMI. We’re seeing such massive difference and how products affect based on BMI and even in some cases, as I have my coffee in my hand, coffee drinking habits, things like that. Some of these things, you may not use it necessarily for formulation, like at the gender or age… Really helpful, I think, for formulations, so that you can actually have a product, clinically proven for men or women or for women over 40. Those, I think, are perfect for formulation, but the rest of it, Matevž, is things that you and your department can use. Why would you not want to actually say this product doesn’t seem to work that well for coffee drinkers so you may not want to spend a lot of time in those channels or maybe it does work really well for coffee drinkers and you can double down and actually go for it. It enables you to optimize your marketing spend to the groups of people, the subpopulations the product is likely to do higher benefit for versus much lower benefit, so that you increase the chances that the right subpopulations purchase and then benefit and repeat purchase, right? It actually helps inform R&D, labeling, and claims and helps really, especially at the more granular level, with marketing. And regarding the marketing side, I mentioned biostatistics in terms of actually doing claims and stuff. You can actually run AI models for the marketing side, can really get into great cluster analysis and things like that, so that you can use it. It’s not allowed to be used for claims, which is perfectly fine, because I think advanced biostatistics is sufficient there. But if you want to really get into those personas, as we call it in marketing, you can get that kind of information to know exactly how your different personas are benefiting and optimize your marketing spent.
Matevž Ambrožič
That’s really quite a step further, if not a leap, I think, compared to what a standard cooperation with a clinical research organization would be. Are you even comfortable with the term CRO and clinical research organization or is that too much of a box for you and you’re jumping out of that box?
Pelin Wood Thorogood
We have jumped out of that box. You have to compare yourself to what has been done, so that people have context, but we had that realization I think about three years ago, actually. Jeff and I regularly go to TED, the main conference, and actually, Jeff spoke there two years ago, which was amazing. When we were explaining it to people, it turned out these were people who were focused on category creation. So, it was one of those serendipitous meetings. They said, do you realize you’re actually creating a new category? And I was like, I think you’re right. But it was a moment, where they had to tell me, I hadn’t even realized it. Think a hundred plus years ago, transportation is a business and horse and buggy was how we transported things until Ford came along and created a car. It was not faster horses. It was an entirely different thing. It was still in transportation, it was still getting people from point A to point B, but was doing it so differently. It wasn’t 10% faster, it was mindbogglingly faster, and you could go places that you never even considered going before. It wasn’t that you were getting there faster, you were doing things that were not possible before. Then we had airplanes. Then all of a sudden, I could go to London for a meeting and come back two days later, which was not conceivable before. So, categories and new leaps enable us to do things that were not possible before. It’s not just about doing something faster than before, it’s also enabling and making possible things that weren’t possible before. We believe that’s what we’re doing. So, with that in mind, we actually launched the Proof-as-a-Service category, because again, what do people want? They don’t want to do clinical trials, what they want is clinical proof. They want to create clinical evidence at a speed, and affordability, and scale to be able to drive better R&D and innovation. Make sure they have the right claim so they actually feel comfortable in saying what they’re saying and it’s backed up. And to be able to do much better marketing to the subpopulation that they should do, and that’s not something you could do with the old style clinical trials. What we do is Proof-as-a-Service. In 2023, that concept got us the World Changing Idea of the year by Fast Company. We actually won the Innovation by Design for our data design, again by Fast Company, and NutraIngredients named us Start-Up of the year. And I was so happy to graduate from Start-Up of the Year to, in a just year and a half, Nutritional Outlook’s Best Service Provider for the industry of the year, just this past December in 2024. That leap, that speed is, I think, what we’re doing is different. It is actually changing the game. It’s not just making it incrementally better, which by the way, I’m not at all opposed to incremental improvement. We need that all day long. But certain things require those big leaps, those step-function changes. And I believe that’s exactly what we’re doing at Radicle Science.
Matevž Ambrožič
I think it goes so well with the general trend of personalization in a very, that’s a very broad umbrella term. But, in this sense, I think it’s so important to highlight that the investment that one makes in, let’s say 150 or so, 120.000 USD for the clinical study. I can see it being justified and even turn into savings in terms of marketing, because for a marketing spend on all kinds of social media ads, any kind of display ads, being able to target that more specifically as from the results that you get from the clinical trial. I think that could pretty soon result in savings, because I think this isn’t typically done. Typically, marketeers don’t have access to information for whom, for whom, correct? The »m« was right there. For whom the product is more efficient and therefore the marketing would be more prudently spent and more efficient.
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Well, you should spend on people that are more likely to repeat purchase. Why would I spend money on somebody who’s going to be attracted to the brand, to the label, but when you take it you’re like, that doesn’t do anything for me. And think about how much people jump around brands because they’re not even sure what works. And the other part is really that consumer trust. If it says clinically proven and you can actually go on the website, if you’re so curious to actually look up that data that has been published in a place with a whole bunch of MDs, PhDs who were behind it, and is published on Pharmaceuticals or Nutrients and some amazing place. You’re like, okay, this has been studied not on mice but on people, and it shows that it works, it works for these conditions. I feel a lot more comfortable purchasing a product like this or as a doctor, I feel much more comfortable recommending such a product to my patients. That consumer trust enables that first purchase and furthers the beautiful marketing that we do. And then the fact that what’s inside actually works and people feel better will actually improve that repeat purchase. So, to me it’s really the only way for us to create lasting success and that CLV, that lifetime value that we’re all looking after.
Matevž Ambrožič
In zooming out now towards, as we are naturally towards bigger macro trends. What’s your view on how marketing will evolve and how clinical trials will evolve? Will perhaps clinical studies on the finished formulation become even a necessity for brands to even be competitive in the future? Will it become the standard for food supplements? How far do you think it’ll go? And also, how far do you think it will go with personalization? Will, in the end, will we live in this world where you will know the exact effect of your product on every population and be super precise in your marketing? How far is it until, how long is it until we get there?
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Billion dollar questions and, we no longer have million-dollar questions. I think we have billion-dollar questions now. So, to actually attempt to answer them in the right order. Yes, I do believe that the more companies go out with products with clinical trials and clinical proof on finished products and consumers see that and it works for them, the more we’re going to lean towards them, because would I want to go with something that’s proven or do I want to take, oh this looks like a really nice label, I think I’m going to take that? I don’t think that is. There’s going to be a line in the sand and people are going to be choosing that, and this is not just my opinion. We’ve done some market research, consumer studies with UCSD, UCLA, and other universities to actually understand – consumers prefer it and they’re even willing to pay more for products that are clinically proven. Just like we know a lot of us prefer organic products, now that we know they are and we’re willing to pay a little bit more for it even, right? So, that line exists. Once there’s a line in the sand, people can make a decision. I’m not suggesting everyone will do that, but at the end of the day, to put money in something that you have no idea is going to work or actually give money to a product that you know is going to work for your sleep or your anxiety or your cognition or your bloating. Why would you pick the one that you don’t know is going to work? That is a very illogical thing. I do believe that’s the case, as more people do it. And I think the earlier people are going to gain that market share, because they’re going to gain the consumer trust and the recognition and the repeat purchase, because you have a loyalty associated with a product that actually works. There’s also virality. This product works, let me talk about it to my friends and family. We all do that, just think about it as our own natural behavior. So, there is that. In terms of the marketing piece, this part gets really exciting for me. You probably realize this, and I feel so geeky being this way, but it really does excite me. When you actually do this kind of cluster analysis and understand which personas your product actually works for etc., then you can actually, as you’re acquiring consumers, you can know which persona or cluster to assign them to. So, you know exactly how you can market to them differently because you’re going to have multiple personas, not just one or two, right? And how you market to them, how you do retention marketing to them, how you may do customer support to them. So, you can actually personalize your entire marketing approach by creating those assignments because you know the match of how the product works differently, how the communication may be different, because as we collect this data, we also understand what voice they like, how they like to be communicated. It’s not even about, this product works for this person. It’s also how they talk about it, leveraging a lot of their text answers, we have a sense of their voice. So, you can actually go towards personalization for the marketing side, collecting data from the clinicals and become a lot more of a powerful targeted marketer. I think there are so many possibilities in terms of getting that precision marketing. That’s going to happen, I believe… We’ve been doing precision marketing now for like 20 years and getting better and better at it, and this is the kind of data that makes it even better because you’re putting that health and behavioral data together, understand the voice of the consumer and then together… We already have the tools to be able to go to market, now we have even better, more granular data to feed that.
Matevž Ambrožič
I think that on one hand is the consumer demand for efficacy, on the other is what you mentioned, I’m just summarizing what you mentioned for now. It’s the ability to have precision marketing and the efficacy of precision marketing, both of these factors driving the higher prevalence or higher occurrence of clinical substantiation on finished products. But one thing, I think it’s worth noting also, is the macro trend of the type of companies that are, or even neighboring industries that are entering supplements. For some time now, big pharma companies have been increasingly entering supplements, because they’re looking for a new quick revenue source with all kinds of pressures they have on their total revenues. But I think now the more recent, let’s say development or the recent frontier that’s been opening up, is beauty companies, personal care companies. There’s a lot of talk of L’Oréal now finally entering supplements, and there’s examples like Shiseido or there’s other brands. And all these companies are traditionally built to clinically study products, and it’s what they would expect, it’s their modus operandi and I think that is going to drive more clinical substantiation. Them launching clinically studied products is just going to create pressure on other companies to do so and it’s a good pressure, in the end, for the industry, luckily. There’s sometimes pressure to drop prices and that’s a bad kind of pressure, because everybody’s in price competition, just looking where to cut costs and cut corners, but this, I think, is a good kind of macro pressure that’s going to drive in the same direction, I believe.
Pelin Wood Thorogood
I completely agree with you and what I love about the pressure you’re talking about is it enables win-win-win scenarios. It’s actually the consumer wins, the brand that actually do the right thing win, the healthcare providers have more information and then they are able to actually recommend wellness products instead of only going to pharma, which is what they feel like well, it has a checkbox, so I’m going to go with this because I have no idea how these things work. I feel like insurance companies can win in the end because why would you want to pay a lot of money for sick care if there are ways you can promote wellness and pay less money, because at the end of the day, their goal is to obviously reduce their costs. I think retailers are going to win because they’ll know which products to put on their shelves, which products are moving, and which products are working for what portions of their consumer base. I think there’s a lot of win-win-win across the board. And to me, that’s the kind of business model that when it supports everyone and it supports everyone financially and for wellness, it doesn’t get a whole lot better.
Matevž Ambrožič
It’s a perfect project to be a part of, and I think a very, very nice company to be a co-founder and executive chairwoman of. And speaking of, again, moving back to Radicle, maybe. What’s next for Radicle Science? What’s on the horizon for you guys, and where are we going to meet again in terms of events, let’s say?
Pelin Wood Thorogood
In terms of what’s on the horizon, let me actually talk about something we just launched a couple of months ago. It’s our product, Radicle Journey. We’ve talked a lot about clinical trials, which is super important, but we found out from many of our brands that we work with, they don’t actually know exactly how their consumers, their existing consumers who purchase from them or their new consumers, are using their product, how they’re adhering to those instructions, the package instructions, and how they’re individually benefiting. They wanted to be able to collect that data so they could inform their marketing as well as future product innovation. So, Journey is our post-purchase consumer engagement and health impact tracker, leveraging similar technology what we’ve done before. We’re enabling consumers of a brand as they are purchasing to sign up for a free journey, so that they are reminded to take the product, and they are actually entering information on their conditions and stuff baseline real-time information, since it’s not a blinded product, you know what product you’re taking. You put information, you’re like, “Oh, this is how my sleep score is.” And then as you take the product and you’re ready to take the product, first of all, you have a better biological effect because you’re taking the product, but you’re also seeing how you’re moving towards, if your sleep is getting better and things like that. The brands are loving the extra data, the reminders, improved sales velocity, but most importantly, they’re actually seeing 20, 30% increase in repeat purchases because there’s a lot of consumer trust. The fact that the brands are actually opening and saying, if you feel this, use this to understand how the product is benefiting your unique body and unique condition. That’s the kind of product that works beautifully with our clinical trials. You’re actually getting the right products to market and they are proven, and then you’re allowing the consumers to prove it to themselves. So it’s a two-step process. It’s a proven product, but now prove it to myself to make sure it works for Pelin, it works for Matevž. So, it’s a really good way to continue that end-to-end cycle and continue those repeat purchases while collecting data to further inform future product innovation as well as improving marketing.
Matevž Ambrožič
And of course, the increased compliance, I guess, then just feeds back into the product more likely to exert its effect, therefore the consumer getting this feedback loop of okay, the product works and taking more. So, you’re just really binding that cycle together. I can see a lot of wins there again. That’s an interesting new development, you said you launched this very recently?
Pelin Wood Thorogood
We launched at Expo West, in March. It’s definitely a virtuous cycle. The more you take it… I don’t know about you, but most of us have bottles that we start-stop taking, we forget it’s sitting there with pills in it, it’s not doing any good for me. So, being reminded to take it, being reminded to take it at the right time and things like that, or also learning. It all says take one pill or whatever, right? Well, we find out how many people take, you find out that certain groups of people may actually take more or less. You’re also understanding patterns, so it’s really helpful for businesses, but it helps the consumer to take it, gives the consumer feedback as to how it’s helping them. That’s really helpful because we all need that kind of feedback. Health tracking is a big thing. We all have Oura rings, Apple Watches, all this stuff, but do you know how your supplement is working for you? Not until Radicle Science, right? So, it’s really helpful to have Journey to be able to do that. And then that aggregate data with lots of fun machine learning to give you awesome clusters can really inform immediate marketing help as well as future R&D help.
Matevž Ambrožič
I think you’ve just opened up a topic for another podcast, because this product seems to be, too many questions are appearing in my mind and I have to suppress them a little bit. I think it’s time to thank our audience for being with us here today and very much, first of all, thank Pelin. It was really, really great for you to take the time for our podcast. I’m very, very thankful. It’s always a great pleasure to talk to you and I hope to see you again soon.
Pelin Wood Thorogood
Matevž, this was so much fun. Thank you for such a fun, engaging conversation and really diving into a lot of different areas. What we’re talking about is not only science, it affects all of business. This is how we’re going to grow the entire industry, that’s how we’re going to drive consumer trust in the industry, healthcare provider trust in the industry. What we’re talking about is, proof-tech can really change the game in a big way, and to make it accessible is really what we all need to do. That’s my mission, that’s our mission at Radicle Science, and I really appreciate you noticing that and inviting me here, so it’s been such a pleasure. Thank you so much again.
Matevž Ambrožič
Absolutely. The pleasure has been ours, and thank you, for our audience, for listening in and see you again next time. Bye-bye.
