The next decade of clinical trials innovation

Clinical trials have not fundamentally changed over the past 20 years, but there have been signs that practices are slowly evolving.

The white paper Future Trends in Clinical Trials: Looking Ahead to the Next Decade of Innovation explores what the future holds for clinical trials and how the process might evolve over the next 10 years.

Authored by Graham Belgrave, senior vice president, head of European operations at Advanced Clinical, the white paper also features Shwen Gwee from Novartis Biome, co-founder of CORTS, the Center of Outcomes Research and Telemedicine Switzerland in Zurich Dr Wolfgang Renz, and IDEA Pharma CEO Mike Rea.

Between them they discuss potential changes to how companies find, access and treat patients, and look at how innovations such as e-consent, virtual trials and electronic data capture will help.

The publication comes at a time when study sponsors increasingly focus on niche and small patient populations, as clinical prospects in rare diseases present themselves, and as advances in genetics and the increasing use of biomarkers are allowing personalised medicine to become a reality.

Meanwhile, adjustments to traditional regulatory practices are becoming a necessity as rules, both industry-specific and more general, force pharmaceutical companies and their trusted partners to adapt.

Nevertheless, the monumental costs involved with clinical trials and the perpetual challenges posed by patient recruitment and retention are forcing companies to address traditional shortcomings in research.

Part of the answer to these problems will come from initiatives to streamline the process, along with those that apply digital technologies to increase efficiency.

Alongside this, the white paper looks at how a shift towards more patient-centric thinking could create opportunities for clinical trials to further evolve, as it considers how to advance patient recruitment, expand access to studies, use remote trials and hybrid approaches and implement new ways of thinking about data.

The white paper can be accessed here or by clicking on the buttons above or below.