The AI that reads 20,000 clinical trials so a cancer patient doesn't have to - and gives every patient an unbiased view of all their options in about two minutes.
Leal Health built the map. Here is what it does, who it serves, and why a small New York team ended up on a TIME best-inventions list.
When a person is diagnosed with cancer, the hardest problem is not always the disease - it is the search. Somewhere among tens of thousands of open clinical trials and a shifting list of FDA-approved therapies sits the option best matched to their exact diagnosis. Most patients never find it. The eligibility criteria are dense, the databases are built for researchers, and two people with the same cancer can be offered different paths depending only on which doctor they happen to see.
Leal Health, founded in 2017 as TrialJectory, set out to close that gap with software. The company built an AI engine that reads through thousands of trials and treatment options, extracts the fine-print criteria that define who qualifies, and matches a patient against them based on answers to a short questionnaire about their diagnosis and disease progression.
The intake takes about two minutes. What comes back is a personalized, unbiased list of FDA-approved treatments and clinical trials the patient may be eligible for - the kind of view that would otherwise take a specialist hours to assemble, if it were assembled at all.
The platform is free for patients and free for oncologists. Over its run it has covered more than 22 cancer types - roughly 95 percent of cancers - and facilitated millions of treatment matches. In February 2026, Leal Health was acquired by Nexus Precision Health, and its work continues inside a larger precision-medicine network.
Figures drawn from company statements and the 2026 acquisition announcement. Some materials cite up to 4M matches and ~150,000 patients on the platform. Treat as approximate.
The product looks different depending on who opens it - but every version answers the same question: what are all of my options, really?
Roughly 150,000 patients have used the platform to find matched treatments and trials without needing to decode research databases. The promise is unbiased access - every option, not only the ones a single clinic happens to run.
A free portal, launched in 2023, surfaces personalized clinical-trial matches at the point of care, so a busy clinician can check options for a patient in minutes rather than combing registries by hand.
More than 90 drug companies use Leal's platform and analytics to reach and enroll eligible - and often underrepresented - patients, addressing one of the industry's chronic bottlenecks: trial recruitment.
Partnerships with two of the five largest US health insurers extend matched-treatment access to members, aligning payers with better-informed treatment decisions.
Every patient deserves an unbiased view of all their options. By joining Nexus, we can expand into rare genetic diseases and mental health.
Public tools like ClinicalTrials.gov are exhaustive but built for researchers - a patient can search them and still leave without an answer. Rival platforms such as Massive Bio, Deep 6 AI, Antidote, Tempus and Carebox attack pieces of the same problem, some focused on hospital systems, some on data, some on recruitment.
Leal Health's distinguishing bet was to point the tool at the patient first and make it free, then combine two things most competitors kept separate: FDA-approved treatments and clinical trials in a single point of access. In 2024 it folded a patented generative-AI engine into the match - improving accuracy and speed without adding a single step to the patient's two-minute intake.
Total funding reported around $53.7M across rounds (per aggregator data). Bar heights are proportional to disclosed round size; seed shown as illustrative minimum. Acquired by Nexus Precision Health, Feb 2026 (terms undisclosed).
The platform grew from a single patient-matching tool into a suite spanning patients, clinicians and pharma.
A free, patient-facing AI tool: answer questions about your diagnosis in ~2 minutes, get matched FDA-approved treatments and trials.
A proprietary platform, free for oncologists, delivering personalized trial matches for their patients at the point of care.
Positioned as the first single doorway combining approved treatments and clinical trials for cancer patients.
A patient-centric, program-level analytics platform to help drug companies improve patient participation in trials.
A patented generative-AI engine integrated to optimize the accuracy and speed of treatment matching.
An end-to-end offering plus a predictive patient-journey solution to guide patients across their full treatment path.
The model is two-sided. Patients and oncologists pay nothing. Revenue comes from biopharma companies that pay for clinical-trial recruitment and patient-participation analytics, and from health plans that partner on member access.
It is an alignment as much as a pricing scheme: pharma sponsors need to reach eligible - and historically underrepresented - patients, and patients need to find trials they qualify for. Leal sits in the middle and gets paid when the two connect. That structure is also why the patient-facing product could stay free at scale.
Nine years of applied oncology AI: parsing eligibility criteria, structuring messy trial data, and - since 2024 - a patented generative-AI matching engine. Recognized by TIME (2020) and Fast Company (2021).
In the "last mile" of precision medicine - not discovering new therapies, but making sure patients can actually find and access the ones that already exist. That access gap is exactly what the Nexus acquisition aims to widen beyond cancer.
Four co-founders - Tzvia Bader, Avital Gaziel, Noam Geva and Guy Gildor - launch in New York to fix biased, fragmented access to cancer trials.
An algorithm reads trials and matches patients from a short diagnosis questionnaire.
The clinical-trial-matching platform is named among the year's best inventions.
Recognized in the AI and data category of the World-Changing Ideas Awards.
Raises roughly $20M to scale coverage and the platform.
Launches a clinician matching portal and a program-level analytics product; rebrands to Leal Health.
Adds a GenAI engine, an end-to-end patient support platform, and raises a Series B (~$26M).
Joins Nexus to extend unbiased matching into rare genetic disease and mental health; CEO Tzvia Bader joins Nexus leadership.
| Round | Amount | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Seed | Undisclosed | 2018-2019 |
| Series A | $20M | Feb 2022 |
| Series B | $26M | Apr 2024 |
| Acquisition | Undisclosed | Feb 2026 |
Total reported around $53.7M. Acquired by Nexus Precision Health.
Led Leal Health from founding through the Nexus acquisition; now on the Nexus executive leadership team.
Avital Gaziel, Noam Geva and Guy Gildor co-founded the company in 2017 alongside Bader.
This is a category-building moment that makes precision medicine executable at scale.
AI tech should not be siloed - we implement advanced precision medicine technologies in the real world.
The company began as TrialJectory before rebranding to Leal Health. "Leal" is an archaic word meaning loyal or faithful.
Patient intake takes about two minutes - roughly the time to make coffee - to return matched options.
Its Twitter/X handle is still @TrialJectory, a fossil of the original brand.
Though based in New York, Leal Health carries Israeli startup roots through its founding team.
Profile compiled from public sources including company press releases, TIME, Fast Company, Crunchbase and the 2026 Nexus Precision Health acquisition announcement. Financial and usage figures are approximate.