Alen Hadzic — Clinical Trial Scan, Dyno AI & Engineering Patient Enrollment

**Adam Walker:** Today's guest is Alen Hadzic, founder and CEO of Clinical Trial Scan, where he is redefining how clinical trial enrollment is planned and executed. Rather than treating recruitment as a reactive challenge, he approaches it as an engineered system that can be modeled, predicted, and optimised before a study begins.

His academic background spans financial economics and pre-medical studies at Columbia University, followed by a Masters in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship at Vlerick Business School. Alen's perspective is shaped by years in consulting across medical devices, pharmaceuticals, pricing strategy and retail execution, then leading digital advertising and patient acquisition initiatives — gaining deep insight into how algorithms and distribution mechanics decide whether patients ever see a study opportunity.

**Alen Hadzic:** Adam, it's a pleasure. My mission is to remove all ambiguity from clinical trial enrollment. I'm also a former professional athlete, a musician — writer, singer, drummer, guitar player — and a human being on this planet Earth.

**Adam Walker:** How does that lead into what you're doing with your company today?

**Alen Hadzic:** I'm grateful to my parents for placing me in so many different activities, and my professional athletic career took me all over the world. My consulting career exposed me to a lot of different industries — anything from call center operations to nationwide trucking to oil and gas containers to pharmaceutical products to medical devices. That range gives me a pretty unique perspective on the clinical trial enrollment issue we're facing.

**Alen Hadzic:** Most people, if you ask them how they got into clinical trials, will tell you it dropped on them like a bomb. Mine was similar. I was working as an independent consultant on the roll-out of Spravato — a nasal esketamine spray for major depressive disorder — on the sales side, not the trial side.

Then during COVID I reconnected with a good friend, Artyom, who was working as an affiliate marketer running paid social ads for clinical trial recruitment. Advertisers put money on Facebook or Instagram in exchange for a fixed payout per qualified lead. That's what really piqued my interest in clinical trials and in advertising in general.

Over three years I ended up placing 50–60% of the total advertising volume for some of the world's largest recruitment vendors — SubjectWell, Acurian, AutoCruitment, TrialBee. We got paid, for example, around $100 per qualified Alzheimer's lead versus $70 for a qualified diabetes lead. Across that period I amassed somewhere between $5 and $7 million worth of advertising data.

**Alen Hadzic:** Then the reimbursement started to get squeezed. What used to be $100 for Alzheimer's dropped to $30, and it just became impossible. With the IRB-approved materials and questionnaires we were handed — some up to 50 questions long — I realised the people commissioning us didn't have a solid understanding of what it actually takes to qualify one person.

At that point I decided I wanted to control the funnel end to end and learn the clinical trial ecosystem. Once I understood the real goal was to *enroll* a subject, that's when Clinical Trial Scan and Dyno AI took off.

**Alen Hadzic:** Dyno AI first predicts the cost per pre-qualified interest for a given indication and geography. Then it ingests the protocol's eligibility criteria and converts them into funnel-step probabilities.

The seven funnel steps we predict are: (1) call response rate — historically ~70% pick-up across nine touch points; (2) eligibility on the phone screen; (3) whether an eligible caller books an appointment; (4) whether they show up; (5) on-site confirmation of eligibility; (6) screen pass vs screen fail; and (7) actual enrollment. That last one is often overlooked — some patients screen-pass and still choose not to enroll.

Cost per enrollment then equals cost per lead divided by the product of those funnel probabilities. That methodology is now a patent-pending, non-provisional filing.

**Adam Walker:** The warm lead is really the key, isn't it?

**Alen Hadzic:** The biggest lever for dropout isn't a concierge service — it's the time between someone expressing interest and being contacted. Calling 100 people who signed up in the last 48 hours produces very different outcomes than calling 100 people from a database who have been waiting six months to a year.

That's why I push back on the AI-database narrative. If you have a 1,000-person database and EHR parsing flags three candidates for a rare disease study, the first doesn't answer, the second isn't interested, the third screen fails — and now what? Hot leads through digital advertising are how you actually run a repeatable funnel.

**Alen Hadzic:** We run it end to end. Most 9-to-5 setups can't work the call blocks — people answer their phones in the evenings, not at lunchtime, and if you're not there you have a problem. Our chief of operations, Juan Santiago Martinez, built a team in Medellín, Colombia — American-Colombians who speak both languages, cover US time zones and work the evening blocks that actually convert.

At the site level we never charge per enrollment. Sites get an initiation fee — between $3,500 and $5,000 depending on a Dyno-derived difficulty score — that pays for the callers, the assets, and direct CTMS integration so we can book the appointment on the eligibility call itself. The moment you need to call someone back with availability, 60% of them will not answer again.

**Alen Hadzic:** I want to be clear: we are not an AI company. We *leverage* AI. We use it for calculation, for deriving eligibility criteria from the protocol, and to keep our benchmark data trained against continuously uploaded Facebook advertising data.

For every client contract we run Monte Carlo simulations across each of the funnel probability points and present three scenarios — low, moderate and likely spend. What's telling is that cost per enrollment across those scenarios rarely varies by more than $100 or $200, provided everyone maintains consistency in calling and follow-up.

**Adam Walker:** The company is very US-centric today — is that the intention going forward?

**Alen Hadzic:** For sure we're looking wider. We now have a site network in Colombia that came out of a partnership with a friend who runs Rogans, the South American answer to Hims. Colombia is emerging as a top-three destination for clinical trial activity behind Brazil and Argentina, and any Spanish-speaking or Commonwealth country is a market we can already run ads in. I'm very keen to get the first Latin-American trial started so we have real CPL numbers to feed back into Dyno.

**Alen Hadzic:** I'm super stubborn — I rarely listen to advice. But my Olympic fencing coach, Alexey Cheremsky, was a second father to me between the ages of 16 and 30. Sport taught me insane motivation and dedication: if you don't show up at least 20 minutes before practice, there's no reason to be at practice.

My parents are just as influential. My mother is a PhD in French literature; my father, a Bosnian anesthesiologist who came from nothing, is one of the few people I've ever seen genuinely run on one hour of sleep for extended stretches.

**Adam Walker:** Golden rule in life and in business?

**Alen Hadzic:** Show up. If you're competing against multi-billion-dollar companies, you set the alarm for 4am and by the time your first call is at 9:30 you've done five days' worth of work. You may not see the difference today or tomorrow, but five years later nobody catches up with you.