The moment that sparked Crick happened in a hospital waiting room. A friend had just been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and her oncologist mentioned there might be clinical trials worth exploring. "Look on ClinicalTrials.gov," he said, handing her a business card with the URL scribbled on the back.
She went home that night and spent four hours clicking through a government database that looked like it hadn't been updated since 2005. The search interface was clunky. The results were overwhelming—thousands of trials, most irrelevant. The medical jargon was impenetrable. Trial eligibility criteria read like legal documents. And most frustratingly, she had no way to understand how the drugs being tested actually worked, or why her specific genetic mutation might make her a good candidate for certain treatments.
"There has to be a better way," she told me. And she was right.
Clinical research exists in silos. If you want to find trials, you go to ClinicalTrials.gov. If you want to understand gene-disease associations, you navigate to OpenTargets. If you want to see what a drug molecule looks like, you dig through PubChem. If you have genetic test results from 23andMe, you're mostly on your own trying to make sense of the raw data file.
Each of these resources is incredible on its own—massive public databases funded by taxpayers and maintained by dedicated scientists. But they're scattered, technical, and designed primarily for researchers, not for the patients and families who need the information most.
The result is a knowledge gap. People facing serious diagnoses have to become amateur medical detectives, jumping between databases, learning new terminology, and trying to connect dots that should already be connected. Meanwhile, researchers waste valuable time manually cross-referencing information that computers could link instantly.
We built Crick with a simple but ambitious vision: what if all of this public biomedical data lived in one place, connected intelligently, and presented through an interface designed for humans?
Crick brings together over 400,000 clinical trials from ClinicalTrials.gov, genetic associations from OpenTargets and ClinVar, molecular structures from PubChem, and 23andMe genome analysis capabilities. But more importantly, it connects them.
Search for "Breast Cancer" and you don't just get a list of trials. You see the knowledge graph: BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes connected to the disease, PARP inhibitor drugs targeting those pathways, clinical trials testing those drugs, and the molecular structures showing you exactly how these compounds work at the atomic level.
This isn't just data aggregation. It's knowledge synthesis—showing you not just facts, but the relationships between them.
Every design decision in Crick starts with one question: "Would this make sense to someone who just received a frightening diagnosis?"
We obsessed over the search experience. You can type in plain language—"lung cancer with EGFR mutation" or just "diabetes trials near Boston"—and Crick understands. The filters are visual and intuitive, not hidden behind database query syntax.
We made the interface warm. Medical data doesn't have to look cold and clinical. Our color palette uses soft emerald greens, warm ambers, and comfortable neutrals. The typography is readable. The spacing gives your eyes room to breathe. Because you might be using this platform during the most stressful time of your life, and a hostile interface is the last thing you need.
We built the Knowledge Graph Explorer as an interactive visualization, not a static diagram. You can click on any node—a disease, a gene, a drug—and watch the network reorganize around it. It's like Google Maps for medical knowledge: zoom out to see the big picture, zoom in to explore specific connections.
And we made it fast. Search results appear in milliseconds. Pages load almost instantly. Because when you're searching for hope, every second of waiting feels like an eternity.
One of Crick's most powerful features is the 23andMe Genome Analyzer. Upload your raw genetic data file, and Crick identifies clinically significant variants, shows you related clinical trials, and maps how your genetics connect to disease risks.
Here's what's remarkable: this all happens in your browser. Your genetic data never touches our servers. We never see it, never store it, never have access to it. The entire analysis runs client-side using modern web technologies.
This was non-negotiable for us. Genetic information is the most personal data you have. We designed the system so that using Crick's genome analysis requires zero trust in us as a company. Your data stays yours, always.
Let's talk about the business model—or more accurately, the lack of one that involves charging users.
Every piece of data in Crick comes from public databases: ClinicalTrials.gov (NIH), OpenTargets (funded by public-private partnerships), PubChem (NIH), ClinVar (NIH). These datasets exist because of taxpayer-funded research and the collaborative spirit of the scientific community.
Putting them behind a paywall would be fundamentally wrong.
We're not saying "free trial then $99/month." We're not holding advanced features hostage behind "premium tiers." Crick is free for everyone, period. The patient searching for trials, the medical student learning about gene-disease networks, the researcher exploring drug mechanisms—everyone gets full access.
This isn't naive idealism. We're exploring sustainable models: institutional partnerships with research hospitals, grants from foundations focused on patient access, and ethical data services for biotech companies that keep individual access free. But we've committed: individual users will never pay for Crick.
None of this would be possible without the incredible public resources that power Crick. ClinicalTrials.gov represents decades of work cataloging every registered clinical trial. OpenTargets synthesizes evidence from dozens of sources to map gene-disease relationships. PubChem contains molecular data on over 100 million compounds.
We see Crick as the connective tissue between these resources—not replacing them, but making them accessible, connected, and understandable to a much broader audience.
We also built Crick with deep respect for the researchers, clinicians, and data scientists who created these databases. Every data point you see has been carefully validated by experts. We don't editorialize or add unverified information. When you use Crick, you're accessing the same trusted sources that researchers rely on, just through a better interface.
Patients and caregivers searching for clinical trials, trying to understand a diagnosis, or making sense of genetic test results.
Researchers who need to quickly explore gene-disease networks, find trials in their domain, or understand drug mechanisms without clicking through a dozen databases.
Medical students and educators teaching the next generation how diseases, genes, and treatments interconnect.
Biotech professionals scouting the competitive landscape, identifying drug repurposing opportunities, or understanding trial designs.
The intellectually curious who want to understand how modern medicine works, even if they don't have a medical background.
Crick is for anyone who believes that medical knowledge should be accessible, connected, and beautiful.
We're just getting started. The current version of Crick connects four major data domains, but there's so much more to integrate: protein structures, biological pathways, imaging data, electronic health record insights (de-identified and aggregated, of course).
We're working on AI-powered features that can answer natural language questions: "What trials am I eligible for based on my genetic profile?" or "Show me all PARP inhibitors in Phase 3 trials for ovarian cancer."
We're building collaboration tools so researchers can share annotated knowledge graphs, and patient communities can crowdsource experiences with specific trials.
But no matter how sophisticated Crick becomes, we'll never lose sight of that hospital waiting room moment—someone scared, overwhelmed, and searching for information that could save their life.
That's why we built Crick. And that's why it will always be free, always be improving, and always put humans first.
Explore Crick at crick.ai and discover how clinical research can be accessible to everyone.
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