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Part 8 of our 10 part Early Stage Series: Health research is supposed to generate evidence that informs decisions — what works, what doesn’t, and for whom. But in reality, evidence is scarce where it’s often needed most. The challenge before us isn’t simply to cheer for innovation — it’s to build systems that ensure good ideas survive long enough to be tested
Most good ideas in human health never get tested. Not because they’re bad — but because of how our research ecosystem is built.
Before we can talk about breakthroughs, we need to talk about what never makes it to us in the first place: promising, plausible, often low-cost ideas that get stalled at the earliest stages of research. This isn’t just a founder’s frustration — it’s a structural problem with clear consequences for patients, innovators, and public health alike.
Health research is supposed to generate evidence that informs decisions — what works, what doesn’t, and for whom. But in reality, evidence is scarce where it’s often needed most.
Take research waste: decades of meta-science show that a staggering proportion of clinical research either generates weak evidence or asks the wrong questions in the first place. When teams don’t prioritize what we don’t yet know, opportunities get lost.
According to estimates in epidemiology and evidence synthesis, as much as 85 % of biomedical research investment is wasted — not because people aren’t trying, but because studies often fail to address genuinely important uncertainties with rigorous methods that decision-makers can act on. (Meza, 2025)
Beyond poor design or reporting issues, biases in funding, prioritization, and review shape what gets tested at all. Research agendas are disproportionately influenced by legacy biases toward established institutions, conventional methods, and familiar diseases — while innovative, high-risk, high-potential ideas struggle for resources.
Policy reviews also document structural bias in funding and research priorities — whether through industry sponsorship shaping agendas, reproducibility concerns skewing results, or peer review mechanisms that inherently favor “safe” over novel ideas.
What this means is simple: there are fewer tests than ideas, and those tests are not evenly distributed.
If you’ve tried to get early evidence — even for a plausible intervention with compelling models — the roadblocks feel universal:
These are not abstract problems — they’re the lived reality for founders and innovators trying to push early evidence into real human testing. Fundamentally, the gap isn’t just technical, it’s institutional.
As Koralo founder Guido Albanese shared when reflecting on launching their first human study:
“You don’t need a pharma-scale trial to begin generating human evidence. Well-designed, focused studies can already create scientific credibility and strategic clarity.”
But the reality is that even well-designed, focused studies often struggle to get off the ground in the first place.
Too often, innovators are told that “science will sort it out,” while being left to bootstrap the evidence themselves — chasing pilots, angel checks, and feasibility grants, all while navigating systems built for later-stage validation and scale.
In health innovation, hype without evidence is expensive — and sometimes harmful. Without credible, early human evidence:
This is why prioritizing early evidence isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s ethical. The world can’t afford the status quo, where promising ideas die untested while routine, incremental projects get funded because they fit existing norms.
For patients, the cost is deferred solutions and delayed answers. For founders, it’s a career of frustration masked as “lack of evidence.” For science, it’s a trajectory that increasingly prioritizes safe bets over what actually moves the needle.
Early evidence needs to be infrastructure, not a privilege.
Because the problem isn’t that founders don’t care about rigor, it’s that rigor is often priced like a luxury good.
Traditional trials are slow, centralized, and expensive by default. Even after a strong pilot, moving into a real human study can take millions of dollars and years of institutional waiting. That’s where most good ideas stall. A bottleneck of access hinders progress.
Alethios exists to change that by making early evidence easier to design and cheaper to generate. With the Alethios Study Planner and features like AI Quickstart, researchers can go from idea to a full study design in minutes—turning uncertainty into a protocol that’s ready to test.
Then, once a study launches, Alethios has honed the infrastructure to run it. Our internalized system and the Alethiad participant network make high-quality, rigorous trials possible at a fraction of the traditional cost.
This is mission-critical for human innovation: we have to make science possible earlier, before promising interventions fade away untested.
The challenge before us isn’t simply to cheer for innovation — it’s to build systems that ensure good ideas survive long enough to be tested. Structural bias in funding and research prioritization won’t disappear overnight, but we can create processes that reduce its impact.
That means tools and platforms that:
Most good ideas in human health never get tested. But with the right infrastructure — and a commitment to prioritizing early evidence over institutional inertia — we can change that.
And that’s a step toward a healthier, more equitable science ecosystem — one that's embodies by our Early Stage Program. If yu're a part of an early stage team and you'd like to run ahuman evidence study at a budget you can afford, apply at the link.
Meza N, Madrid E, Urrútia G, et alAligning research funding and the production of useful evidence to reduce research wasteBMJ Evidence-Based Medicine 2025;30:434-436.
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Whether you're a researcher or participant, Alethios makes health research effortless and impactful.
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