Lucid completes 6-months of mentorship from the National Institute on Drug Abuse

From January until June 2024, Lucid received monthly education and one-on-one mentorship from members and Directors of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), an agency of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Lucid was afforded this opportunity as a 2023 Stage-1 winner of the “$100,000 Start an SUD [Substance Use Disorder] Startup” Challenge, which NIDA has offered since 2015 to support advancements in our understanding of and treatments for SUD.

What did we learn?

• 📝 Build a Target Product Profile (TPP). TPPs are often used by biopharma during research and development. Creating a software-based TPP helped us pinpoint our product must-haves, identify delighters, and quantify our value and vision.

• 🏥 Identify the decision-making unit. In healthcare, the end user isn’t always the buyer. Each stakeholder is incredibly complex, and it’s crucial to understand who holds the power. To complicate matters even more, our systems of care for mental illness and substance use disorder are sometimes intertwined, but more often separate.

• 🗣️ Know your audience. Users, clinicians, investors, and researchers care about different things. It’s important to tailor your messaging.

What does this mean?

The mentorship and the Challenge taught us so much about product development and clinical validation. It helped us narrow down our product roadmap for the next few months. We are also grateful for the non-dilutive funding that we secured after having successfully presented Lucid at the peer Board of Directors meeting in June 2024.

It was amazing to learn from experts in the field of substance use disorder and technological innovation, and we are beyond grateful for the time, energy, and insights that the team at NIDA provided.

Read more about the Challenge and other winners here!