Our Story
We didn't start MedX because clinical research needed another company. We started it because Houston needed one that was built for its people — and because the patients who need tomorrow's medicine most have been waiting the longest to be included.
Chapter 01
Years before MedX existed, we were just two friends in Houston talking about the things we kept seeing — and the things we couldn't stop thinking about.
Dawood had spent over seven years working at the intersection of healthcare, clinical research, and product management — building software with clinicians, watching how slow, fragmented, and exclusionary the research world could be from the inside. Huzefa had spent three years working in clinical research operations, close enough to patients to see how often the system missed the people who needed it most.
We'd sit down for coffee and end up talking for hours. About protocols getting stuck because sponsors couldn't find enough patients. About entire communities — Hispanic, South Asian, African American, working-class — who'd never been offered a trial in their life, even though their disease burden was higher than anyone's. About brilliant physicians in private practice who wanted to do research but had no pathway to sponsor-funded trials. About families we personally knew, in our own community, who were fighting diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity — conditions where every new therapy happens through research — and who had no idea clinical trials were even an option.
One day the conversation stopped being hypothetical. We realized: if we don't build this, who will?
The Founders
Co-Founder
"I spent years building tools for clinical research from the outside. At some point I had to stop building for it and start building inside it — where the patients actually are."
Co-Founder
"Every day in clinical research, I watched the system try to find patients — and miss the ones already sitting in doctors' offices across Houston. MedX fixes that."
Chapter 02
Houston is one of the most diverse metros in America. Over four million people. A patient population that looks like the actual future of this country — not like the narrow slice clinical research has historically studied.
And yet — when we looked at the west side of Houston, the Katy–Cypress corridor where hundreds of thousands of families live and receive their care — we found almost no independent clinical research happening. Physicians who wanted to offer trials to their patients had nowhere to turn. Sponsors who wanted a diverse patient population had no infrastructure to reach them. An entire community, talented and growing and getting sick like everyone else, was being asked to wait.
The numbers made it impossible to ignore:
people call Greater Houston home — one of the fastest-growing metros in the country
of Houston is Hispanic — yet Hispanic Americans represent less than 8% of clinical trial participants nationally
independent private research sites existed in the Katy–Cypress corridor before MedX
When someone tells you 35% of your city is missing from the research that decides what medicines get made — you don't write a paper about it. You go build something.
Chapter 03
We think about the grandmother with uncontrolled type 2 diabetes whose insulin isn't working anymore, who doesn't know a trial for a new GLP-1 is running fifteen miles from her house.
We think about the 40-year-old man newly diagnosed with fatty liver disease, told there are no approved treatments — when in fact dozens of MASH trials are recruiting right now, and nobody has told him.
We think about the parents managing a child's thyroid condition, the working mom whose PCOS no one takes seriously, the young father with a cholesterol profile his doctor has run out of tools for. They all deserve more options. They all deserve to be asked.
Clinical trials are how medicine moves forward. Every single drug on a pharmacy shelf is there because, at some point, real people — someone like your aunt, your neighbor, your coworker — stepped up and said yes. We built MedX so that the next generation of "yeses" can come from a community that has too often been left out of the room.
Chapter 04
We promise to meet patients where they already are — in their doctor's office, with the clinician they already trust. We won't ask them to drive across the city to a strange new site. We won't ask them to navigate a system designed without them in mind.
We promise to compensate patients fairly for their time and their contribution. We promise to make language, transportation, and logistics never be the reason someone can't participate.
We promise to tell the truth — about risks, about benefits, about what we know and what we're still learning. We promise to treat every patient the way we'd want our own mother, father, brother, or sister to be treated.
And we promise to keep building. MedX starts in Katy and Cypress, but our mission isn't a ZIP code. It's a belief: that the people who have been most underserved by medicine deserve to lead the next chapter of it.
Whether you're a patient curious about a trial, a physician interested in partnership, or a sponsor looking for a true community site — we'd love to hear from you.
Get in Touch