Q&A with Pelin Thorogood, Co-Founder and Executive Chairwoman, Radicle Science
Q: What is the story behind Radicle Science’s founding and how is its mission transforming the health and wellness space?
Pelin: Radicle Science was born from Dr. Jeff Chen’s and my shared desire and determination to upend our broken healthcare system. I’m a serial tech entrepreneur turned philanthropist, driven by a passion to leverage large scale data to drive smarter health and business decisions—especially in personalized wellness. Jeff is a visionary physician/scientist frustrated by pharma’s slow, profits-first model and with the rare entrepreneurial experience in natural product clinical trials within academia. Together, we combined our complimentary backgrounds and shared vision to spark a rebellion against the status quo that favored sickcare over true wellness.
We were fed up with a one-size-fits-all approach that dismissed natural, unpatentable treatments and stifled innovation. Determined to rewrite the rules, we embraced the daring spirit and rallying cry of Sir Ernest Shackleton: “The work will be hard, and safety is not guaranteed, but when we succeed, we will permanently alter the course of wellcare for all future generations.” That call to action resonated far and wide - and continues to bring together the Radicle Rebels, passionate changemakers united by our transformative mission to redefine healthcare.
Today, Radicle Science stands as a strong movement dedicated to transforming health and wellness by making proven, personalized treatments accessible to all. We’re not just challenging the status quo—we’re building a future where individualized care and data-driven insights will empower every person to achieve optimal health.
Q: What are ‘precision insights’ and how do they transform health and wellness?
Pelin: Traditional clinical trial findings are often about the "average person"—a theoretical construct based on a midpoint of varied characteristics across a data set. This approach is a byproduct of the small size and lack of participant diversity that has plagued clinical trials. Thus, it shouldn’t come as a surprise these “average” findings fail to capture the individual variations essential to drive real-world health and wellness. After all, designing for this statistical average is essentially aiming for a target that doesn’t really exist.
In contrast, Precision Insights are hyper-targeted, data-driven findings that reveal how factors like age, gender, BMI, and lifestyle choices (e.g. diet and exercise) may impact a wellness product’s effectiveness, empowering brands to create truly personalized solutions for better outcomes. Precision insights are fueled by robust, large-scale, real-world evidence—meaningful data collected from diverse study populations on how an intervention actually performs, outside the narrow and often artificial confines of the research setting, and in the reality of our everyday lives.
Until recently, we simply lacked the high-dimensional health and behavioral data from large and diverse populations to power precision insights. Just as importantly, we also lacked advanced technologies, such as AI, needed to analyze such massive data sets. Now, businesses have the unique opportunity to leverage precision insights to inform R&D to create personalized products, and enable marketing to target consumers most likely to benefit. In short Precision Insights has the power to transform wellness from a generic promise into a smarter, personalized approach that drives better outcomes both for businesses and consumers.
Q: What is the role of AI and machine learning in developing these insights?
Pelin: AI and machine learning are essential to transforming vast, multidimensional clinical data into precision insights that drive personalized wellness. AI has the power to reveal complex patterns and hidden correlations in large datasets that traditional methods often overlook. By analyzing relationships among factors such as age, gender, BMI, condition severity, medication use, diet, and exercise across diverse populations, these advanced technologies help assess how these factors may affect an intervention’s real-world effectiveness.
Q: How do biostatistics play a role in delivering precision insights and what does this fit with the AI approach?
Pelin: At Radicle Science, our approach is a beautiful dance between AI and biostatistics. AI fuels our hypothesis generation and predictive modeling efforts by identifying consumer subgroups and forecasting treatment responses. Biostatistics then steps in to validate these hypotheses, ensuring the final findings meet rigorous scientific and regulatory standards, while remaining clinically relevant. This dynamic interplay not only enhances our predictive power of our large-scale trials but also translates raw health and behavior data into never-before seen precision insights.
By leveraging this synergy, we empower brands to refine R&D, optimize clinical trial designs, and develop personalized finished products tailored to real-world consumer experiences. The result is a shift from generic, one-size-fits-all solutions to wellness strategies that truly work for individuals. We are excited to be pioneering the power of AI to transform traditional clinical data into smart, targeted insights for nutraceuticals—ushering in an era of wellness that’s both innovative and truly personalized.
Q: With greater consumer interest in health tracking and willingness to share data, what could that mean for companies in terms of collecting data for business growth and product development?
Pelin: With nearly half of Americans tracking their health daily, and with 69% reporting improved well-being, wellness brands have a unique opportunity to leverage real-world data for marketing and product innovation. However, until now, the impact of wellness products often went unmeasured. This is why I am so excited to share the launch of our newest offering: Journey by Radicle Science. Built on our award-winning Proof-as-a-Service platform, Journey is the first health impact tracker tailored for wellness brands.
For the first time, Journey will empower brands to enable purchasing consumers to monitor their wellness while demonstrating the personalized effects of their products. The engagement process is seamless: Journey collects demographics and assesses baseline health for consumers who opt into the web app, then tracks their product usage and health progress over time, sending regular reminders to maintain engagement. Each time consumers provide data, they receive individualized health snapshots that visualize real-time changes in their tracked health conditions, culminating in a personalized health report at the end of their Journey.
Every participant and tracked milestone not only boosts adherence and repeat purchases but also unlocks invaluable insights that inform product strategy, target marketing, and ultimately business growth.
With the introduction of products like Journey, I see health impact tracking transforming vast consumer health data into actionable insights that ultimately drive the future of personalized wellness. Exciting times ahead!