Novo Nordisk partners e-recruitment firm to boost diabetes trial numbers
The Danish pharma firm will use the e-recruitment programme for an initial four type 1 and type 2 diabetes studies in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, beginning in the first quarter of this year.
According to Trialbee’s founder and VP of Sales, the firm’s platform is a web-based centralised system that can find and match patients to entire clinical trials - both nationally and internationally – and will be used by Novo Nordisk in parallel with traditional recruitment techniques.
“Traditional patient recruitment is turned out by the investigator and usually involve individual websites and newspaper adverts,” he told Outsourcing-Pharma.com. This in-house recruitment process is decentralised, he continued, and can be a far too long a procedure.
Trialbee, however, communicates directly with the patient groups using a range of digital media, web and mobile applications and social media sites. “Turning directly to the patient groups,” Billing said, “leads to a step-by-step qualification which is more certain in the recruitment process than traditional methods.”
Though there are other players in the third-party patient recruitment industry, Billing said the majority of companies using the same space as Trialbee were currently situated and active within the US.
Furthermore, “more traditional recruitment companies usually work with patient databases,” he said, which in his opinion “tend to grow old quite quickly, and therefore patients on it might not be available for trials.”
For Novo Nordisk, the implemtation of Trialbee will help ensure trials can start as planned, topping up patient numbers not achieved with traditional techniques.
Though focused on the Nordic area, Billing said Trialbee also has capabilities across Europe. Furthermore, the firm has already completed successful patient recruitment campaigns with Sanofi and Astrellas and is in ongoing discussions with a number of other promising Big Pharma partners.
