Interview with Lightship co-founder Samantha Eells

Hear insights on improving access to clinical trials with  guest, Sam Eells, co-founder of Lightship. We dive deep into her inspiring journey from her early interests in science and healthcare, to her work in public health that led to the founding of Lightship. Learn how Sam's experiences at UCLA shaped her passion for creating better patient experiences and addressing health disparities in clinical trials.

Sam and I explore the mission of Lightship and how it aims to revolutionize the clinical trial industry by providing improved patient experiences, greater access, and more choices for participants. We discuss the crucial relationship between clinical research and public health, and how the pandemic has shifted the industry's focus to collaboration and innovation. Find out why Lightship's customer-centric approach is a game-changer and why you should care about the services this groundbreaking company provides.

We also examine the importance of social determinants of health in clinical trials and the role environmental sustainability can play in shaping the future of research.

As of March 2025 HealthBiz is part of CareTalk. Healthcare. Unfiltered and can be found at the following links:

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Host David E. Williams is president of healthcare strategy consulting firm Health Business Group.

Episodes through March 2025 were produced by Dafna Williams.

Chapters

• 0:10 Improving Access to Clinical Trials
• 13:17 Clinical trials and public health
• 21:41 Clinical Trials and Sustainability
• 30:34 Improving Access to Clinical Trials

Transcript

0:00:10 - David
Historically, there has been a mismatch between patients who participate in clinical trials and the overall population that those drugs are designed to serve. Correcting the mismatch means making trials more accessible and attractive to a broader set of people, including those who don't regularly interact with a health care system. But that's easier said than done. On today's show, we're going to explore how one company is helping the industry take on that challenge. Hi everyone, i'm David Williams, president of Strategy Consulting firm Health Business Group and host of the HealthBiz podcast, a weekly show where I interview top health care leaders about their lives and careers. My guest today is Samantha Eells. She's co-founder of LightShip, which focuses on improving access to clinical trials. If you enjoy this episode, please press that like button and subscribe. Sam, welcome to the HealthBiz podcast. 

0:01:00 - Sam
Hi, David, thanks for having me on. It's great to be here with you. 

0:01:04 - David
It's a great topic and I'm glad that to finally meet a company that's focused on this area. So we're going to talk about that a little bit once. We discuss sort of how you got there in the first place. So I'd love to hear a little bit about your background, your upbringing, any childhood influences that have stuck with you. Start with that. 

0:01:22 - Sam
Yeah, sure. So I'm based in LA. I've been here for a little over 15 years and spent most of my childhood growing up in Southern California. So for me, growing up how we kind of got here has always. I always really enjoyed science, healthcare, thought it was really really interesting. Even as a kid I was reading books like Andromeda Strain and the Hot Zone and going, wow, that is just so cool And I want to be able to do that when I grow up. So I think I was set on this path from the beginning. 

And I think the other probably really influential bit in my life was I played really competitive club soccer all the way up into college And I think that probably lends itself more to how do I think about working together and people as teams and how you support each other. That kind of goes alongside this trajectory of how do you actually end up founding a company one day, and so I think from there I went to UC San Diego and that was again a decision made some time early in my teenage years. I had a soccer tournament there and looked around and said that this is it, this is the beautiful campus. It ended up that it was. It's also a great, great school for a science background and interest. So lined up and I went to school there, did undergrad and got a degree in biology and a minor in psychology. So those were my sort of two interests there And I think you know, interestingly, i think it was my third year I was in a medical microbiology class and the professor said does anyone really like this? 

And I think me and maybe one other person raised our hands and said yeah, we think this is really interesting. He said, okay, come see me after class And so I go down there and he goes. If you think this is cool, you should go get a degree in public health and you should go to Emory University. Okay, great, okay, that sounds great, great plan. So I ended up like checking out the school. 

You know for Emory being right next to the CDC, being in Atlanta, there's just so such a wealth of public health activity going on And it's also just a great, great program, great school. So I went there and got undergreen epidemiology, did a lot of focus on sort of study methodology as well, as you know, learning about infectious disease, got to do the. All the things you think about that are exciting, about being in the public health space in Atlanta. Spend some time doing research projects with the CDC. Got to work, do some volunteer work at the county department of public health, work in the lab, work in the hospital. Really got the opportunity to see a little bit of everything in the ecosystem around. You know healthcare, science, all that. 

0:04:39 - David
Is that county? is that Fulton County? Is that where? 

0:04:41 - Sam
Yeah, that is Fulton County. 

0:04:43 - David
I don't know, I don't know all the counties in the country, but that's one I think is in Atlanta. 

0:04:46 - Sam
so Yeah, that's the big one, And and I really even at Emory, my mentors, my advisors, were really just great about giving me the opportunity and I think you know most students there get this is just being able to like touch and feel and see what all is going on in this space so that you can kind of, you know, figure out those things like what do you want to do when you grow up? So for me, what I realized was, you know, while working in the lab was really interesting and fun. It's also very, it felt very lonely. I'm a little more extroverted than that. So you know I, you know they asked me sort of towards the end of the program what do you, what do you want to do next? And I said I really think clinical research and working with people to help them to make an impact, that you can very, you know, you can really see and feel actively as you're doing it for me feels like a really great fit for just my interest, my personality. I want to do that And they helped me really get my first job here in LA, which was working at Harbor UCLA, which is a LA County hospital that's also affiliated with UCLA. 

There I got, i think, a tremendous opportunity in being able to grow kind of grow from like a program manager into getting a faculty position and working in the Department of Medicine at UCLA and the Division of Infectious Disease doing really like federally funded research programs, a lot of NIH, hrq, looking at infection prevention in the community, and you know how do we think about improving health outcomes, health disparities in South Los Angeles, and that's really where I got my my first, i think, introduction into going to see people at home. So we did a lot of home visits and, you know, trying to find ways to make it easier for people to interact with the health care system, get access to the care, understand, you know, any sort of health conditions they were dealing with, and I think that was a really kind of the foundation for how do we then get to these next stages of my career. 

0:06:59 - David
And that sounds very good. You know, it's interesting to hear you know this. This is the Southern California part and it's you know why you moved over to Atlanta, moved over to Atlanta and then snapped back to Southern California, and then I think maybe we could start to talk about Science 37, which is an interesting organization, and I saw on your LinkedIn that it says you were employee number one. Who is employee number 37, I want to know. But anyway, what's Science 37? Why 37 anyway? Why did they call it that, or why did you call it that? 

0:07:27 - Sam
Yeah, so Science, 37, you know, moved over with the sort of four I think there were four or five of us in the beginning that all moved over from UCLA. We'd all worked together in different capacities And we really liked that name. So Science, because we're, you know, we're trying to do science, we're trying to evolve the space and help people, But also, so 37 is the average human body temperature. Being a bunch of scientists, we liked that number because, you know, if we can bring people back to sort of like homeostasis in a balanced, balanced place, that is really, you know, the goal of what we're trying to do in clinical trials and getting better, better therapies to people. So that's, that's how we got there. On the 37 number, it is. It also has many connotations in numerology. It's if you ask someone to pick a number between one and 100. 

0:08:24 - David
On average also pick 37. Nice, Nice. Now, do you think if the human body were a little bit warmer they'd pick 42 instead, Or is it just happens to be? it's about the right numbers, like not sort of in the middle, but not exactly in the middle. 

0:08:37 - Sam
Yeah, i think. I think so There's. there's something to it, it's just a meaningful number. 

0:08:42 - David
Very interesting, and so what was the concept behind there? It sounds like there's some sort of a continuation of what you were doing on the academic side, in a way. 

0:08:49 - Sam
Yeah, definitely. So the concept there, as as we got started, was could we use technology and most specifically in that those early days, could we use telemedicine to make it easier for people to take part so that they didn't have to, you know, drive into the clinic, drive into the hospital? They could connect with, you know, expert care practitioners in the context of a clinical trial via video. And that was the really initial start of what we were doing And we were working with a few different large pharmaceutical companies, sort of test out that hypothesis and do it in a few small studies before we kind of built out more and built the organization. 

So for me, you know, science 37 was another, i think, amazing learning and growth experience, because certainly, building a technology platform, working with you know, how do you do fundraising with investors, how do you work with large pharmaceutical companies to meet the quality and the scale needs, all of that was, you know, experiences that I just hadn't had before. So it was, even when it's just in that lens, like very exciting to get all of those new experiences And I think also in the moment, really being, you know, either the first or one of the first companies to think about doing it. It was also just a very special moment in time where we were creating a market fit in a product that just didn't exist. 

0:10:27 - David
Right. So you were talking about testing hypothesis, which was essential, that you could use telemedicine for clinical trials. Now, was it also a hypothesis? Was there another hypothesis that you could attract a more diverse set of participants? Was that part of it as well? Was it more of a sort of a technical hypothesis? 

0:10:46 - Sam
It was that technical hypothesis. Could you do it one just to get started? 

And then that, i think, is whether it's telemedicine or we get further along in the years and we talk about different modalities of people being able to take part in research or access it. 

It has been that exactly what you opened with. when we think about traditional clinical trials, they've happened at big academic centers, where people who have insurance, people of a different socioeconomic status have access, and so there are a lot of people who in populations and oftentimes even the people who are most impacted by a health condition haven't had access to a clinical trial. So by doing these other modalities that help people get access, they make it easier. The goal with that has really been can we create more inclusive clinical trials that are much more reflective of the diversity and just the depth of different folks in the United States in particular who live here, so that they're more representative? In the end, the goal that is also you get a better understanding of the medication or the therapy that you're trying to understand. How does it work, what does the safety profile look like? All those things are sort of the end goal. I think of what we're trying to do in that bigger picture. 

0:12:18 - David
So Science 37 was ahead of its time because what you're describing here in terms of telemedicine for clinical trials was before the pandemic, really before Zoom, and also the idea of having more representative population although it was something that was discussed on the academic side, it wasn't a mainstream notion really at the time. And then all those things were in place when the public health emergency did hit and the company was, I think, probably after you were there when public, through a SPAC merger, got a lot of attention and is now down to being worth next to nothing. So what? any comments you'd like to make about where did it go wrong? I mean, why are they in a bad spot now, considering that they seem to be ahead of the time before? 

0:13:03 - Sam
Yeah, i think Science 37 and I did leave in 2018, so it didn't go through the experience of going public and the changes that happened over the last few years organizationally. When I think I sit and reflect on how are we and the space we're in with Science 37 and what's happening for them, i think a part of it is the markets in general, for the last year have not been kind to SPACs. It hasn't been kind to digital health and the mix of technology and services together in the healthcare space. So I think that's just a baseline challenge for any organization in that space. And then I think when I listen to their earnings reports or any other company updates, i think it has been that challenge that not just Science 37, but all of us face. and how do you really grow and scale these clinical trial organizations in a way that has the balance of being a profitable business but also really delivering high quality clinical trials for patients and sponsors? 

0:14:20 - David
Great. Well, i won't make you say anything more about Science 37, since you're not responsible for it and haven't been for about five years. Let's talk about light ship, and what was the need, what's the founding story behind light ship? 

0:14:33 - Sam
Lightchip. We founded it at the tail end of 2018. And when I met the founding team here, our goal was to build an organization that was really service oriented. So thinking about different services, different service models that we could work with both pharmaceutical companies to meet their quality, their scale needs, but also a really improved patient experience in creating more access and choice for participants. So a similar thread on the. You know how do we create an organization that makes it easier for people to take part wherever they are in a study? but thinking about that as a service model where we do things like we have home nurses that do research who go visit participants at home. We have mobile research clinics in units that go to communities where you know and they're all different depending on the study. Thinking about other locations where people could take part from. And then, really, you know how do we use technology in a way that enables that? that again makes it easier, makes it seamless, makes sure that we are collecting all the data that we should be and all the quality checks are embedded in that from the beginning. So that was sort of the. 

I think for me it was an exciting experience in terms of just founding it and getting the first seed round, because it, you know, we can take. What I said it was on probably about five slides total. So it was definitely the experience in a moment in time where it was really someone you know Coastal Ventures is who did our seed round with us really believing in an idea and believing that the team we had and the mission and the vision we were working towards that we could build that into an operating model, build that into a business. So, that said, in 2018, 2019, we were starting out with, you know, our seed round small team and a mission and a vision to build an organization to make it easier for people to take part. And then the pandemic happened. 

And it went from you know wow, we're thinking about this as an innovation conversation with a lot of the pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies that we're talking to to a complete shift of you know. Everyone has to figure out how to work together to do this, because it's the only way we can do research right now. 

0:17:20 - David
Yeah, so it's pretty exciting. So you know, at this point you talked about how you looked at, you know, biology, public health, and then kind of tying in the clinical research side of things. how were you looking at the relationship between clinical research and public health And then, especially, sort of as the public health emergency came along, how did these ideas fit with one another? 

0:17:46 - Sam
Yeah, for me, you know, when I think part of it is because I do have a public health background. 

So when I think about this, you know, improving public health is a big, broad population level conversation. 

Yeah, And clinical trials are, you know, kind of the next level of you know, when we're talking about people living with a specific condition or looking for new therapies or new treatments, that it's that moves down to sort of a more individual level as we're talking to different participants and people in studies and thinking about, you know, what is going to work for them. 

So I kind of think, as public health is a big, the big overarching goal in improving health and health equity overall, And then as we are working on each individual clinical trial, it really does start to, you know, work at the individual level for people. How are we, you know, helping them access this? How does it help that person or their community or other people living with the same condition, either in the context of that trial and understanding if the medication or the therapy works, And also for some clinical trials not all, they may be an actual treatment option for that participant If they're out of other options or the medication or therapies they're taking right now don't really work that well for them. So it is in some cases an opportunity for that individual person to access newer medications that they wouldn't be able to outside the context of a study. 

0:19:29 - David
So there's sort of a moral imperative about why you'd want to have access to trials for underserved populations And I understand that part of it. But I think, getting back to your point about you know Ghost Leventures believing in you, is there a reason to think it's a viable business, like why does somebody, why does the customer care about that? You know, is it actually an imperative for them, for some kind of a business reason, to make you know the populations in trials similar to the populations that the drug is actually for? 

0:20:01 - Sam
Yeah. 

So when we talk about clinical development of new therapy options for the companies that are developing the therapies, it's really important for them scientifically to understand what the safety profile of that therapy looks like. 

When we talk about does the therapy work, does it not work, having that you know, the research that you're doing in that context be more representative of the people in when we think about, if the medication gets approved, what would happen in the real world. So having that be as reflective as it can be of the you know sort of real world population that would be using it is a path to just better understanding, better science about how does that therapy work. There's probably a whole other podcast we could do on this lessons learned in the industry on that, where medications have gone to market And then we have learned that, oh, in this, you know, in a population of different people with different profiles, maybe it doesn't work as well or it has side effects that we didn't know. So doing learning that earlier in the process so that once the therapies you know out there and being used and being prescribed, we have a much better understanding of it Going into it Are the differences that you see in the way that medication may work with one population versus another. 

0:21:41 - David
Did these have to do more with the sort of differences in human biology versus, you know, cultural factors or just like social determinants? Does it even matter to tease those out? or I mean, are there a sense of what you know, what the causes are? 

0:21:59 - Sam
Definitely So. in the, in the sort of broader context of, I think, everyone who's trying to work through what you know social determinants of health. Is it a genetic profile? Is it environmental, Is it cultural? All of those things are under consideration. There are whole companies that are sort of working through what that looks like. What does that mean? We like to partner with those folks as well And but I would say, yeah, there's a, there's a whole for any. you know, when we think about any different condition, there's probably just different levels and variations of those different factors and how they're impacting people taking that medication. 

0:22:44 - David
So the public health emergency is interesting in the sense that it shifted the whole paradigm. If you're going to do a clinical trial, you needed to have you know you needed to do a trial in the way that you do it, as opposed to coming into the clinic. So that was one certainly critical aspect. Another element, though, was just about the awareness of clinical trials. Yeah, you went from people probably had didn't know much about it. Then, all of a sudden, everybody was an expert on, you know, trial design and the difference between, you know, different types of approval, emergency authorization versus the premise you know, which is which is fascinating to hear to hear this, because I've been dealing with clinical trials for a long time and hadn't heard that before. I think you've done some research, both in the US and the UK, about public opinion on clinical trials in particular, but also, i think, more broadly, on telemedicine and healthcare delivery. Is that right, and what were some of the findings coming out of that? 

0:23:39 - Sam
So I think this was probably across across the pandemic. We did that we've done a few different reviews of the one that we put out there and publish was a bigger group of getting opinions from people across the US and in the UK, where we were also operational, and what we wanted to do was really get feedback. You know, when we talk about the way that we work and we wanted to be the best experience possible for people, a part of that is is getting the feedback. What do people want? What do they want to do? What are they comfortable with? And so we did a pretty big survey of folks to just ask questions around. You know, how do they feel about participating in a clinical trial? What would they like to know or learn about in that process before choosing to take part? Would they feel comfortable doing telemedicine or a nurse visiting them at home, going to a mobile unit? 

I think what we learned out of this is that you know, as a broad generalization, people when you, when you ask them, say yes, they'd like to take part, they say generally, yes, i would be comfortable with these different modalities. But what we do realize is that you know not that doesn't work for everyone. There are lots of reasons why, you know, people may not feel comfortable with someone visiting them at home. So what? when we talk about what we do at LightShip and how we're building our organization, the really big vision for what we can do in the future is start to offer people choices so that you know if you want a home visit, you can say that's, that's what I'd like to do, and in the nurse and or the study coordinator will go visit you. 

If you are not comfortable having people in your home, you could go to the clinic, or you could go be seen on a mobile unit and really starting to think through clinical research in a way where people can take part in the way that is. You know it needs to be safe, it needs to be adhering to the protocol, but is also aligned with their, with their preferences, their life and what's going on. And so that's that's some of the feedback that I think we were able to take in around. You know, there it is not one size fits all for everyone. All people have different, you know, things they're comfortable with, and how can we think about doing clinical research in a way that supports that? because I think that also lends itself to more people taking part. If we can align with you, know what is most comfortable for them. 

0:26:19 - David
A lot of this conversation has been about kind of an awareness that the way clinical trials were done in the past is not the only way to do it, not the best way to do it. Partly the technology side, partly there's a diversity, equity and inclusion elements of it and sort of a modern sensibility. And another thing you know think about in terms of just from an environmental standpoint. You know, our clinical trials good for the environment. 

0:26:42 - Sam
That is one of my, like latest, favorite topics. So I think the last, probably a couple of years, environmental sustainability is something that I personally have become very interested in and been spending time thinking through, i guess also as a continuous learner, taking classes at UCLA sustainability just to get a, you know, a better, i think, educational foundation on what it means in the context of clinical research, but also in the context of building a business that thinks about sustainability and has commitments to that, and so one of the things that we, you know, think through in what the work we're doing are those tradeoffs, like how do we think about the difference between asking participants to come see us versus us go see them? And I think, at a baseline level, those. Those are some of the, i think, or like we're in an early space and thinking this through in terms of sustainability And what you know, what do we think about that and how do we operate in a way that is most sustainable in the big scope of it all? 

I think one of the things that is really interesting and we'll probably start, i think, just more conversation about this is when we, when we talk about the, the companies we work with, so pharmaceutical biotechnology companies that are developing medications. They all have commitments to sustainability. There's a lot of you know. Everybody's slightly different, but there's a lot of 2030 goals out there That's coming, yeah, so that'll be here before we know it. And what we're thinking about at LightShip is, you know, as the people we work with to do these studies are having you know their overarching goals, how does that then move into the R&D space? When does you know? when do their commitments at some point in time were, were making a bet that they will then start to ask us to make those commitments, and we are working to build our organization to you know also meet those standards, meet those commitments, so that you know, not only are we aligned with who we're working with, but also we as an organization have you know goals around and ways of working to be more sustainable. 

0:29:07 - David
So I want to close out this show by asking if you've had a chance to read any, any books, any good books that you've read lately, anything that you would recommend to our listeners. 

0:29:17 - Sam
Yes. So I would say anyone who is also interested in sustainability and how you think about it in the context of, you know, building or growing a company. Probably my most favorite book that I've read recently is Net Positive. So it's one of the former CEOs of Unilever, where he really goes through the process of coming in as CEO and wanting to reshape Unilever to be a more sustainable organization and what that meant, you know, at an overarching company level and then for all of the subsidiaries that they have, which are a lot. So for me it was a really interesting book and in kind of diving more into what that looks like and not only the process of it, but also thinking about the cultural impacts in the organizations that they, you know, have in their, in their subsidiaries, and also, just you know, some of the dynamics around. What does it mean to talk about that around? you know, sustainability and maximizing shareholder value, convincing the board that that's the way to go. All of that I found really fascinating to get a glimpse into. 

0:30:34 - David
Well, that's it for another episode of the HealthBiz podcast with me, david Williams. My guest today has been Samantha L. She's co-founder of Light Ship, focusing on improving access to clinical trials. Samantha, thank you for joining me today. 

0:30:46 - Sam
Thank you. 

0:30:49 - David
You've been listening to the HealthBiz podcast with me, David Williams, president of Health Business Group. I conduct in-depth interviews with leaders in healthcare, business and policy. If you like what you hear, go ahead and subscribe on your favorite service. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe on your second and third favorite services as well. There's more good stuff to come and you won't want to miss an episode. If your organization is seeking strategy consulting services in healthcare, check out our website, healthbusinessgroup.com.