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The moment has finally arrived.
After a year of planning, fundraising, and intense coordination, we’re proud to announce our study design is now being powered by our biostatistician as the last step before submitted to the IRB committee for evaluation.
Once approved, we will begin the process of recruiting participants for the study. When that stage arrives, we’ll be announcing it on the Citizen Science Foundation website and across social media.
We managed to get the center we wanted to do the study and will be announcing it when the IRB is approved. This study would have cost several times the $200,000 we raised, but I’m pleased to say we worked out getting the price down to this budget, particularly given our mutual interest in the data.
However, this does present us one more stage of fundraising we’ll need to complete: travel, and genetic testing.
Travel
All the participants will need to be flown to the city of the study, be taxied to their hotel room, stay overnight to be fully fasted and relaxed for their testing in the morning, taxied back to the airport afterwards, and then flown out on the return trip. And this needs to happen twice for each participant, one for the baseline test, and in a second round a year later for the followup.
We believe we can negotiate these expenses in a bulk package deal with the airline, hotel and ride sharing services to get this down to around $250 per visit of our 100 participants, for a total of $50,000
Genetic Testing
Secondly, we need to raise funds for genetic screening so we can ensure no one in the experiment with high cholesterol has this due to an underlying condition, such as familial hypercholesterolemia. We estimate the cost for this to be around $100 for each of our 100 participants, for a total of $10,000.
Thus, we need to raise another $60,000.
But get this – we already have an anonymous donor who has offered to match half of it. So really, we just need to raise $30,000.
And that’s where you come in — you can show your commitment in two important ways. Contribute to CitizenScienceFoundation.org, and/or please share this video to help us reach this critical milestone so we can launch the study when our IRB approval comes back.
Thank you once again for all your support!