For academic & non-profit sponsors
Design the trial the grant can actually fund.
Investigator-initiated and non-profit trials fail on the same things industry trials do — recruitment that never materialises, a site network that cannot carry the target, a design out of step with the indication. Test all of it against public evidence while the application is still a draft.
A design that fits inside a fixed funding envelope.
The situation
The budget is fixed before the feasibility is known.
A grant application commits to a sample size, a duration and a site network at submission. If the recruitment assumption behind it is wrong, there is no commercial sponsor to absorb the overrun — the trial under-recruits and the result is uninterpretable.
- Pillars scored, same as a commercial sponsor
- 6
- No paid intelligence subscription needed
- Public data
- Every figure linked to a public record
- Citable
What happens today
Feasibility is done on institutional memory.
Academic sponsors rarely have a feasibility function, and commercial intelligence subscriptions are out of budget. The recruitment estimate ends up resting on what the coordinating centre remembers from the last study.
The site network is the one you already have
Collaborators are chosen by existing relationships rather than by demonstrated recruitment in this indication — and no one checks how many competing trials those centres are already carrying.
Recruitment is projected from prevalence
Prevalence in the population is not the recruitable pool. Eligibility criteria, competing studies and referral patterns sit between them, and the gap is where the timeline goes.
No budget for commercial intelligence
The subscription datasets that industry sponsors use to answer these questions are priced for industry. The public record holds much of the same signal, but assembling it is weeks of work.
Review panels ask for evidence, not assertion
A funding committee wants to see why the recruitment target is credible. "The centres are confident" is the weakest sentence in the application.
What you get instead
The same feasibility work, from public evidence.
A recruitable pool, not a prevalence figure
Cohort sizing and eligibility complexity: how many patients are realistically eligible once your criteria are applied, and which criterion costs the most.
Centres ranked on evidence
Investigator and site selection based on demonstrated recruitment in comparable trials, with competing-trial density for each catchment.
Your design against the indication norm
Endpoints, comparator and duration compared with what has been run before — and with the statistical power your proposed sample size actually delivers.
An honest cost band
Operational cost benchmarks for the design and geography, so the budget in the application is anchored to something outside the institution.
Citations a review panel can check
Every figure resolves to a public record with a snapshot date — the difference between a defensible feasibility section and an assertion.
What comparable trials already learned
The trials that already ran in this indication, what happened to them, and the stated reasons the ones that stopped early stopped.
What runs, and who drafts
The scope for this job
An investigator-initiated trial lives or dies on recruitment and design, so those pillars carry the weight. Rationale and Commercial still run and matter most where the trial supports a translational or licensing argument.
Pillars involved
How it runs
Run it while the application is still a draft.
Bring the draft protocol or synopsis
Upload what you have — a synopsis, a grant draft, or just the indication, intervention and proposed eligibility criteria.
The assessment runs on public data
Cohort reach, eligibility burden, site and investigator track record, competing-trial density, statistical power and cost benchmarks — computed and cited.
Adjust before you submit
Change the criteria, the sample size or the site list while they are still changeable, and carry the citations into the application’s feasibility section.
What lands on your desk
A feasibility section a review panel can check.
Written to be read by someone whose job is to find the weak assumption — which is the same standard your own protocol committee applies.
What lands on your desk
Feasibility assessment + recruitment and site evidence pack
- A recruitable-cohort estimate with the eligibility burden broken out criterion by criterion.
- A candidate centre list ranked on demonstrated recruitment in comparable trials, with competing-trial density per catchment.
- Statistical power for the proposed sample size, and what it would take to reach the target.
- Design comparison against the indication norm and against comparable trials that have already reported.
- An operational cost band derived from public benchmarks for this design and geography.
- Full citations with snapshot dates, ready to carry into the application.
Honest limits
Where this stops
What this does not do for you. Naming it here is cheaper for both of us than finding it in a procurement review.
It is decision-support, not a grant-writing service and not a regulatory or ethics submission.
Cost bands come from public benchmarks and will differ from your institution’s actual costing. Use them to sanity-check a budget, not to set one.
Site rankings reflect published trial participation and outcomes. They cannot see a centre’s current staffing, local referral changes, or an unpublished competing study.
Recruitment estimates are modelled from public data on comparable trials. They are a check on an assumption, not a promise of accrual.
Where an indication is thinly represented in public registries, the assessment will say the evidence is thin rather than extrapolate past it.
Questions
The ones you would ask first
We are not a commercial sponsor. Is this priced for us?
Tell us what the study is and what the funding situation looks like — including whether it is grant-funded or charity-funded — and we will be straightforward about whether we can make it work.
Can we use the output in a grant application?
Yes — that is the intended use. Every figure is linked to a public record with a snapshot date, which is what lets a review panel verify the feasibility section rather than take it on trust.
Does it work for a rare disease with little registry data?
It runs, and it tells you where the evidence is thin. For rare indications that honest gap statement is often the most useful output, because it is exactly the assumption a review panel will probe.
Do we need to name specific centres up front?
No. The site and investigator analysis proposes candidates ranked on demonstrated recruitment in comparable trials; you can then check them against the collaborations you already have.
Check the recruitment plan before the deadline.
Send us the draft synopsis or the grant outline. We’ll return a cited feasibility read — recruitable cohort, candidate centres, power and cost band — while it can still change the application.