In December, the US Food and Drug Administration cleared the way for Transparency Life Sciences (TLS) to conduct a virtual clinical trial using telemonitoring to collect data from patients' homes. The phase 2 trial will test a long-used blood pressure medication, lisinopril, repurposed for multiple sclerosis (MS), employing a commonly used set of metrics that can be communicated by digital media, such as smartphones and tablets. TLS, located in New York, is the brain child of former Novartis executive Tomasz Sablinski, who has been banging on the idea of reducing the cost of drug development since founding TLS in 2010. The company incorporates crowdsourcing into clinical trial design and will have patients monitoring their progress for all but the first and last assessments to reduce costs. As much as 60% of costs come from data collection, according to TLS's COO and co-founder Marc Foster. The MS trial, which will start once funding is secured, will demonstrate whether TLS can succeed where others have failed. A much touted Pfizer virtual phase 4 trial for a drug for overactive bladder, which employed online recruitment and self-monitoring, was suspended due to low patient enrollment. In its first trial, TLS will “keep it simple,” says Foster, a notion endorsed by Carolyn Compton, president of the Critical Path Institute of Tucson, Arizona, which is developing tools for improving efficiencies of trials. Compton believes that “citizen scientists” are set to revolutionize clinical science, but points to the need for validated, rigorous methods for collecting patient-reported data.