US govt taps Walgreens for decentralised trials

Retail pharmacy giant Walgreens has signed a five-year contract with the US government – worth up to $100 million – for access to its decentralised clinical trials (DCT) network.

Walgreens launched its clinical trials business in 2022, seeking to tap into its reserve of patient data, as well as the ability to recruit patients across its extensive, US-wide retail network into studies. Since launch, the unit says it has made contact with around 5 million people with the potential to join trials.

The company says its network can help improve the diversity of clinical trials, as its retail pharmacies are embedded in a broad spectrum of communities. More than half of Walgreens' nearly 9,000 stores are located in socially vulnerable and hard-to-reach areas, and around three-quarters of Americans live within five miles of a Walgreens outlet, according to the company.

That is a key dimension of the agreement with the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which is focused on making DCTs "more accessible and representative of the US population," it said in a statement.

Nearly 80% of trials fail to meet their enrolment goals on time, at a cost of billions of dollars in delays every year, according to Walgreens. One key challenge faced by trial sponsors is that only 5% of the US participates in clinical research.

It is the second agreement that the business has signed with BARDA after an earlier phase 4 observational COVID-19 trial that has been set up to find ways to improve US public health preparedness.

The unit has also signed dozens of deals with trial sponsors, notably including big pharma group Boehringer Ingelheim, which is using its network to run a DCT of obesity candidate survodutide.

Ramita Tandon, chief clinical trials officer at Walgreens, said that the company's "network of community pharmacies and [...] compliant and secure clinical trial platform enables [it] to pioneer a comprehensive solution to make clinical research an integral part of a patient's healthcare journey, especially when it is most critical for the well-being of [the] country, during a public health emergency."

Walgreens was one of a few retail pharmacy and drug store businesses in the US to launch clinical trial businesses around that time, along with CVS, Walmart, and Kroger. CVS' foray was short-lived, winding up last year in a reshuffle of its healthcare strategy, but Walmart and Kroger are still operating.