What we believe
Why Threshold Trials exists, and how we try to act on it.
Why we exist
Finding a clinical trial when you or someone you love is sick is one of the hardest, most fractured searches in health care — and too often the person least able to bear the cost is the one asked to pay, in money, time, or hope. Threshold Trials exists so that searching for help is free, honest, and built around the person, not around who profits from their data.
What we value
The vulnerable party shouldn't pay to find help.
The search is free and stays free. We are donation-funded, and we reject any model that makes the patient the product.
Your information is yours.
We collect as little as possible, we don't sell it, we don't share it with trial sponsors, and we don't earn anything when you enroll.
Honesty over hope.
We tell you what we actually found, including when results are thin or when our AI might be wrong. We never manufacture urgency or false optimism.
We are not your doctor.
This is an information tool to help you find trials to ask about. It does not give medical advice and it does not make decisions for you.
How we act on this
Plain-language results, no ads, no trackers, no selling of data, and as little data kept as the work allows. We hold the words on this site to the same standard as working code — if a claim isn't true of how the system actually works, it's a defect we fix.
How we hold ourselves to it
We judge ourselves by whether a tired person at a kitchen table at 11pm gets an honest, usable answer — not by engagement, not by sign-ups, not by anything that benefits us at their expense.
If we ever fall short of these values, tell us. This is a small operation; you can write to me at hello@thresholdtrials.org, and a real person — me — reads what comes in.
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.