• Patient Power Survey Reveals Nearly Half Of Cancer Patients Never Discuss Clinical Trials With Doctors

    Clinical Research News | The medical and pharma industries, not the patients, are the cause of low clinical trial participation, says one patient advocate. The remedy is available but requires these industries to forego rigid paradigms, to re-examine their thinking on patient participation, and to refocus their priorities.

    Mar 4, 2020

  • Artificial Intelligence Ushers in a New Era of Cost-Effective Clinical Trials

    Clinical Research News Contributed Commentary | Clinical trials have changed significantly over the past several years. As drugs and devices—and the conditions they are trying to impact—have become increasingly more complex, so has the design and structure of clinical trials. But protocols are costly to change and identifying and enrolling the right patient cohorts is also no easy feat—especially when rare diseases are the target. Study teams are using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to keep up with this rapid pace of change.

    Mar 3, 2020

  • Proven Tactics For Recruiting and Retaining Patients in Studies

    Clinical Research News | Study sponsors looking to improve recruitment and retention in clinical studies—particularly for rare disease research where patients are in scarce supply—might want to apply some of the proven tactics recently shared by Signant Health and UBC at the 11th Annual Summit for Clinical Ops Executives (SCOPE) in Orlando.

    Mar 2, 2020

  • Tips For Improving Patient Engagement and Clinical Trial Experiences

    Clinical Research News | As part of its ongoing efforts to build a patient-centric culture, Takeda is taking patient engagement in drug development to a whole new level, according to Jessica Scott, M.D., JD, head of R&D patient engagement. “Patients want to be part of the process and share the experience with us,” she said from the stage at the 11th Annual Summit for Clinical Ops Executives (SCOPE) last week in Orlando.

    Feb 28, 2020

  • Reporter’s Notebook: Speakers Stress 'Patient-Centricity' During SCOPE 2020

    Clinical Research News | Members of the clinical trial and research community recently convened in Orlando, Fla, for the 11th annual Summit for Clinical Ops Executives (SCOPE). For four days, pharmaceutical companies, trial sponsors, healthcare organizations, and patient advocacy groups discussed the latest advances and innovative solutions in all aspects of clinical trial planning, management, and operation. Here are some of the bits and pieces we collected during the summit.

    Feb 27, 2020

  • ICER, TrialScope, ClinOne, And More: News From February 2020

    Clinical Research News | February was full of exciting news in the clinical trial and healthcare community, including partnerships, products, and promotions from ICER, TrialScope, ClinOne, and more.

    Feb 27, 2020

  • Merck’s Perspective On Why Health Literacy Matters

    Clinical Research News | At Merck, the job of ensuring patient information about medicines and diseases is easy to understand falls to the one-person team of Global Health Literacy Director Laurie Myers, MBA, and she’s adamant that best practices in the field need to be shared. “Patients have the right to understand information to make informed and empowered decisions,” she said during her plenary keynote at the 11th Annual Summit for Clinical Ops Executives (SCOPE) last week in Orlando.

    Feb 26, 2020

  • Effective Risk Management When Using eCOA and ePRO

    Clinical Research News Contributed Commentary | The use of direct source data capture in clinical research is on the rise, both during clinic visits and remotely by patients. This includes investigator-led and patient self-assessments using laptops or tablet devices, patient diary information using hand-held mobile devices, and wearable sensors that automatically record and transmit various health-related measurements (glucose levels, heart rate, etc.).

    Feb 25, 2020

  • Clinical Research As A Scientific Discipline: Birthing A Movement

    Clinical Research News |ORLANDO—A day ahead of the 2020 Summit for Clinical Ops Executives (SCOPE), stakeholders from across the clinical trials enterprise convened for a campfire-style chat on ways to elevate the status of clinical research as a scientific discipline and foster collaboration and pre-competitive knowledge sharing to improve trial conduct. The SCOPE Scientific Symposium (SSS) was led by a half dozen leaders from AbbVie, Pfizer, Biogen, Boston Millennia Partners (BMP), and the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (CSDD), with more than 50 others actively engaged in the dialogue.

    Feb 20, 2020

  • TrialScout Receives Top Honor At SCOPE’s Participant Engagement Awards

    Clinical Research News | TrialScout receives the 2020 Participant Engagement Award for its #FindtheFive campaign, a social media campaign that uses TrialScout’s platform to harness the input from the over five million Americans that have participated in some form of clinical research over the past ten years.

    Feb 19, 2020

  • IBM Watson Health Launches Study Design and Authoring Tool

    Clinical Research News| ORLANDO--IBM Watson Health today unveiled its newest cloud-based technology, IBM Study Advance, at the 11th Annual Summit for Clinical Ops Executives (SCOPE) in Orlando, Florida. The data-driven study design and authoring tool optimizes clinical trial protocol design by merging automated access to real-world patient population data, standardizing protocol template guidance and providing a collaborative workspace designed to facilitate efficiency.

    Feb 18, 2020

  • Phage Therapy Comes Of Age

    Clinical Research News | Five years ago, phage therapy was a largely unknown approach to treating recalcitrant bacterial infections outside of Eastern Europe. But headline-grabbing stories of bacteriophages bringing people back from the brink of death has catalyzed interest in the century-old practice of using viruses to infect and kill disease-causing bacteria—especially now antimicrobial resistance has limited the usefulness of many antibiotics.

    Feb 17, 2020

  • Phages Provide Safety Net In Post-Antibiotic Era

    Clinical Research News | To fully appreciate the potential of Adaptive Phage Therapeutics (APT), it’s helpful to review history through the lens of company co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Carl Merril. For nearly five decades, Carl has been championing the idea of using bacteriophages to treat infectious diseases—an idea for which he has been variably applauded, questioned, ignored, scolded, and, ultimately, vindicated.

    Feb 13, 2020

  • Undoing Antibiotic Resistance With Phage Therapy

    Clinical Research News | Perhaps no academic institution has worked longer on the clinical application of phages than Yale University where research efforts are focused on using the pathogen-fighting viruses to re-sensitize bacteria to the antibiotics they’ve grown resistant to. “We’re hoping to drive evolution in the other direction to preserve our antibiotic arsenal for longer,” says Benjamin Chan, Ph.D., associate research scientist in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology, who maintains a large natural-phage library.

    Feb 12, 2020

  • Phage Therapy: From Compassionate Use To Clinical Trials

    Clinical Research News | At least three different types of phage products currently exist, and all of them are being explored as potential therapeutic remedies for people with drug-resistant bacterial infections. These include natural phages that have not been modified at all, as well as genetically engineered phages where one or more of their genes get modified to optimize their killing potential against a pathogen.

    Feb 11, 2020

  • Phage Therapy Making A Big Comeback

    Clinical Research News | A resurgence of interest in phages over the past few years—in basic and translational research, as well as animal agriculture and aquaculture—is closely tied to the global rise in antimicrobial resistance, rendering once-standard treatments ineffective. In the newly declared “post-antibiotic era,” more than 35,000 people in the U.S. are dying each year from a drug-resistant superbug.

    Feb 10, 2020

  • Population-Based Simulator Analyzes Drug-Drug Interactions In Silico

    Clinical Research News | A newly FDA approved acne treatment was developed and supported by Simcyp, a division of Certara that used their Simcyp Population-based Simulator to expedite and inform drug development, while also providing safety label claim and pediatric dosing information without the need for testing in clinical patients.

    Feb 5, 2020

  • How Real-World Datasets Stack Up to Randomized Controlled Trials: Two Pilots Could Help Inform Regulatory Guidance

    Clinical Research News |Researchers at Brigham & Women’s Hospital (BWH), in partnership with data analytics company Aetion, have been working on a real-world data (RWD) pilot project under the umbrella of RCT DUPLICATE since May 2018 with the financial and leadership support of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The project’s initial goal expanded last April from replicating to predicting results of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) using health insurance claims data.

    Feb 4, 2020

  • Using Real-World Evidence To Gauge Drug Effectiveness

    Clinical Research News | Clinical trial stakeholders, most notably the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), continue to grapple with how to harness the value of real-world data (RWD) and real-world evidence (RWE) for demonstrating product effectiveness. Draft guidance expected to be issued by the end of 2021 should shed light on the three key issues outlined in the agency’s Framework for FDA’s Real-World Evidence Program.

    Feb 4, 2020

  • What Clinical Research Could Look Like With Patient-Centric Trials

    Clinical Research News | Cereval’s Head of Clinical Operations discusses ways to improve the way clinical trials are run, potential barriers to running patient-centric trials, and more.

    Jan 31, 2020