It started in clinic, not in a data centre.

The clinic

Dr Costa began in clinic, with families managing food allergy at home — and with research that still ran on paper forms, spreadsheets and goodwill.

Home care in food allergy is careful, daily work, done by families at their own kitchen tables. The research that should learn from that work too often asks them to do it twice: once for themselves, once for the study.

The problem

Running a study alongside a full clinical job means protocol drafts written late at night, ethics packs assembled by hand from a colleague’s old one, and data management priced beyond an investigator’s budget.

None of those steps is the research. They are the toll paid before the research is allowed to start. The toll lands hardest on the clinicians and academics closest to the questions worth asking.

The build

Dr Costa is an operating system for medical and academic research: one governed path from a plain-language idea to a drafted protocol, an ethics pack, participant consent and data collection, and a locked, exportable dataset.

Its first proving ground is the founder’s own field: longitudinal, home-reported food-allergy research, where careful daily records and participant trust decide whether a study succeeds.

The rules it is built under are on the front page: AI drafts and a person signs; the ledger is append-only; identity is kept apart; and the boundaries are drawn on purpose.