Sometimes the next step is simply understanding your options.
Threshold Trials helps you explore clinical trial information in plain language, without selling your data. Free to use, private by design, and built to stay free and available for the next person who needs it.
No one who is sick or caring for someone who is should have to pay to find help. Your information is yours — we don't sell it, and we don't profit from your search.
This was built by one person who's been where you are. Read why
From Marta
I'm Marta. I'm a mom of three. I've spent my career in technology, and I believe deeply in what AI can do — not to replace us, but to help us: to augment human understanding, to give people better options, to make hard things a little less overwhelming. I'm not a doctor, and I'm not a coder. I'm someone who connects dots and translates complicated things for the people who need them.
This started with a friend. Her father had stage IV pancreatic cancer, and she didn't know where to begin. I wanted to find out whether AI could help her find trials that might matter. This was almost an accident — and then it became something I couldn't put down.
I built it because I've watched the people I love face this, and I've seen how hard it is to even understand what help exists.
My aunt was diagnosed with Parkinson's in her forties. She was a hospice nurse, so she knew exactly what was ahead of her. She met it with a kind of dignity I still think about — she wrote children's books, teaching kids about empathy and the connection between generations, trying to give others something hopeful even as her own road got harder. She believed people deserve to live with dignity and with hope. So do I. That belief is the whole reason this exists.
My uncle is living with Parkinson's too. He's a father figure to me — the one I ask for advice, the one who told me to buy my parents a car when they were struggling, the one I look to when I'm trying to understand how to navigate the world. He used to tickle-fight my kids and sneak them candy until they were sick. He can barely speak now. Watching what this disease is taking, slowly, from someone who gave me so much is part of why I can't look away.
My grandmother had late-stage lymphoma. Well into her eighties she understood the treatments were futile, but she did them anyway, because that was the standard of care. She asked me once — I was a journalist then — to tell her story someday. In a way, this is me keeping that promise.
I think we're at a rare moment. New therapies are emerging faster than they can be tested and brought to the people who need them, and the tools we have to make sense of it all are better than they've ever been. I can't promise this will find an answer for you or the person you love. But I can promise it will give you an honest head start — so you don't have to search alone, down every rabbit hole, just to find out what might be possible.
I know what that's worth, because I've watched it happen. My mother has lived through more than her share — heart disease, a long stretch I wasn't sure she'd come back from, years when she could barely speak. And then, against everything we expected, she came home and got better. She calls me every day now, just to say she loves me. She is the reason I know that what looks like the end of the road sometimes isn't — and that people deserve every honest chance to find out.
Everyone deserves dignity. Everyone deserves hope. This is my attempt to offer a little of both.
I read and respond to every message myself.
— Marta Lawrence
Now — I'll say the quiet part out loud. You don't know me. I'm a name on a website asking you to type in some of the scariest details of your life, and the reasonable part of your brain is going: is “Marta” even a real person? Is this a bot? Is she going to harvest my data and sell it the second I look away? Those are exactly the right questions to ask a stranger on the internet. Keep asking them. Here are the receipts.
And to be clear, the catch isn't that there's no money in this. There is — I know exactly how I'd make it, and so does anyone who's seen how these tools usually get built. It would just mean compromising who I am: walling this off, charging the people who can least afford it, or quietly turning you into the product. I'm not willing to do that. I believe we're meant to use what we build, and the community around it, to further each other — not to fence each other out. I built this for the people I love, but I built it knowing you have people you love too, and I can't keep it behind a wall if it might help them. That isn't who I am.
So, plainly, and with no asterisk: this is free, there are no ads, I don't sell your information, I don't share it with trial sponsors, and no one — me included — makes a cent when you use it. You can read exactly what happens to your data on our privacy page.
And here's your proof that I'm a real, findable, slightly-too-online human with a paper trail:
Two names — which, yes, is precisely what someone with something to hide would say. Over the years I've written for outlets including HuffPost, Business Week, the Cincinnati Enquirer, and the Dayton Daily News, under both Marta Lawrence and Marta Roberts. One is my maiden name, one is my married name. That is the entire conspiracy.
This tool helps you have a better conversation with your doctor. It does not replace one.
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