The agreement, announced yesterday, brings together HLT’s data and artificial intelligence (AI) technology with PPD’s clinical trials and real-world evidence (RWE) generation abilities.
“The collaboration with HLT provides a creative opportunity to encourage more pharma companies to come to China where we can help them create better optimized protocols that will prove more attractive to sites and investigators because they are tailored more to their patient population,” said Niklas Morton, senior vice president of site and patient access for PPD.
As part of the agreement, the contract research organization (CRO) will tap HLT’s network of more than 100 hospitals across 22 Chinese provinces.
Morton explained, “In China, HLT can leverage its large network of physicians and leading Chinese hospitals and has the most advanced analytical capabilities to assist with our strategy of identifying patients first.”
PPD last year launched a site solution for enrolling patients in clinical studies, proposing to enroll patients first – before activating sites – via a new enrollment model.
“Traditional clinical research has focused on using site-performance data to identify the strongest sites and investigators for new clinical trials,” Morton told us.
“PPD’s recent strategic focus has been on using data to first identify eligible patient populations and then seek the sites and investigators best positioned to access those patients.”
Morton also noted the company’s investment in data over the past five years, citing the agreement as fitting with PPD’s strategy to speed patient enrollment.
“Since we have an exclusive CRO collaboration with HLT that will give us a unique offering for our customers,” he added.
