A San Francisco health startup is launching a new website to help people participate in clinical studies working on potential treatments for COVID-19 or a vaccine for the coronavirus that causes it.

Backers say the free site, worldwithoutcovid.org, is for those who have tested positive for the coronavirus and those who have not. The goal is to make it easier for anyone to participate in a study, helping to speed up the process of developing new drugs or a vaccine — two crucial steps in the world’s fight against the pandemic.

The site is an offshoot of Clara Health, a 4-year-old startup that connects people with a wide range of studies in need of participants. Clara Health’s website has listed coronavirus trials since the outset of the pandemic, but the company decided to put a stronger emphasis on COVID-19, said CEO Evan Ehrenberg.

The new site has been in development for about two weeks, Ehrenberg said.

“It’s been a very, very fast assembly,” he said. “As a startup, we have our own reasons to move fast, but also our (software) serves not only to help patients access clinical trials, but to actually accelerate that research. Getting the right people into the right clinical trials is one of the biggest choke points in running clinical trials.”

As of Monday, Clara Health was listing about 470 coronavirus studies, 91 of them in the United States, according to the company. Studies that were testing a possible vaccine or a new treatment were seeking a total of about 272,000 participants while more than 15 million people were needed for observational studies that are focused more on collecting information.

Also involved in starting the new site was Raj Kapoor, Lyft’s chief strategy officer, who was infected with the virus himself; and Vijay Chattha, CEO of the public relations firm VSC.

In a news release, Kapoor said that after he found out he tested positive for the coronavirus, he worried about whether he had exposed his family to the virus and whether there were “any experimental tests or treatments available for them.”

“We were lucky enough to recover, but thousands of others haven’t been,” he said. “This sparked the idea for this important initiative and enabled a World Without COVID for my family and billions of others.”

People who use the site will be asked to fill out an intake form that will help connect them with any nearby studies, and they’ll take a survey to gauge whether they’ve had the virus or experienced symptoms, Ehrenberg said. The site will then offer the clinical studies it thinks the user is most likely to be eligible for and will receive a secure email with more information.

Users will retain ownership of their data and it will be passed along only when they authorize the company to share it with a certain study, according to Ehrenberg.

The company says its site complies with patient privacy laws and has won early support from various health care professionals and tech industry leaders.

J.D. Morris is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thejdmorris