Elisa Cascade

Elisa Cascade is the chief growth officer of TrialScreen, a patient-recruitment company, and a clinical-research executive with more than three decades in the field. Her career has spanned strategic consulting, contract research, the technology side of clinical operations, and the investigator-site side, with a throughline of using technology to widen patient access to research.

Early in the move toward decentralized trials, around 2010, Cascade built and ran a direct-to-patient research community of some 2.7 million people who had opted in to hear about research opportunities, work that was on the bleeding edge at the time. She has since held chief-product-officer roles across the clinical-operations spectrum, including at Science 37 and Advarra, and has served as a board member and past chair of the Association of Clinical Research Professionals.

Cascade appeared on Open Door Salon alongside Jim Kremidas, executive director of the Association of Multisite Research Corporations, for a conversation on why patients struggle to find and reach clinical trials. Her central argument was that every patient who wants a trial should be able to find one, and that artificial intelligence now makes it possible to translate data from the world’s nearly 100,000 trials into plain language at a scale that human navigators never could.

She was equally direct about the unglamorous structural problems: clinical-trial registries, she noted, are accurate less than 20 percent of the time, so even a patient who finds the right study often cannot reach the site. Her approach to fixing a conservative industry is what she calls pragmatic innovation: change made one feasible stepping-stone at a time.