Stephanie Kallay
Director of Patient Advocacy
Partners in Progress: How Patient Insights Drive Innovation
At Crinetics, our mission has always been clear: to build the premier endocrine company that consistently pioneers new therapeutics to help patients better control their disease and improve their daily lives. But our mission is more than discovery: it’s about delivering real, lasting change for people living with endocrine diseases.
We are scientists, drug developers, and advocates united by a shared belief: patient insights are essential at every stage of our development, from early discovery through commercialization and beyond. Their lived experiences shape therapies that are not only clinically effective but also truly meaningful in everyday life.
This isn’t just about communication—it’s about listening carefully to patients’ experiences, challenges, and hopes and translating these insights into smarter science, better trials, and ultimately, therapies that genuinely make a difference.
Listening Differently, Designing Smarter
For over a decade, we’ve invited patients into our world—not as subjects, but as partners in each step of our development journey. In early discovery, insights from people living with endocrine diseases, like acromegaly, CAH, and Cushing’s syndrome, help us define what truly matters in a potential therapy. During clinical development, we design trials that prioritize relevance, accessibility, and reduced burden. And as we prepare for commercialization, programs like CrinetiCare reflect our commitment to supporting the whole patient journey.
What sets us apart in our approach to patient driven development is how we act on what we hear. Patient insight doesn’t just inform our work—it drives it. We make real business decisions based on what patients tell us, including rethinking protocols, refining endpoints and pivoting trial designs to ensure our studies reflect how people actually live with these conditions. When patients tell us something isn’t working, we listen and adapt our approach to better meet their needs.
In other words, we don’t ask patients to fit their lives into our trials. Instead, we design trials that fit into their lives. This mindset improves not only recruitment and retention, but the overall experience—and ultimately, the impact—of our therapies.
Through consistent, meaningful engagement, patients have helped us refine everything from endpoint selection and trial logistics to education, access, and post-approval support. These insights push us to think more holistically about both the disease and their real-world experience of managing that disease.
Our approach reflects our commitment to ensuring patients have access to medicines that are not only innovative but also easy to obtain and stay on—medicines designed to address both their disease and the real-world challenges they face every day. Our goal is to help people live, work and thrive—not in spite of their condition, but with treatments designed to support them fully.
Always Evolving, Always Centered on Patients
We don’t see patient centricity as a checklist. It’s a continuous journey—a discipline that evolves as we listen, learn, and grow alongside those we strive to serve, embedded in how we work, how we build partnerships, and how we deliver solutions that reflect both the science of disease and the reality of living with it.
At Crinetics, patient insight is more than input—it’s a driver of innovation. It sharpens our focus, strengthens our programs, and brings purpose to our science. We’re here to advance endocrine care not only with what we discover in the lab, but with what we learn from the lives of those we serve.