Cerba Research, a healthcare diagnostic firm, has announced a partnership with Biokortex, a company that provides a range of digital solutions to clients in the healthcare sector. According to the collaborators, the partnership is geared toward leveraging biological and medical data from patients, with the goal of supporting patient identification and recruitment efforts.
Biokortex CEO Adrien Ko told Outsourcing-Pharma there are a number of reasons behind the increasing industry pressure to streamline and accelerate patient recruitment efforts for clinical trials.
“These include:
- High site-related costs: Recruitment retention and monitoring account for trial costs
- Low patient recruiting rate: 50% of all trials fail to achieve planned patient enrollment strategies
- Challenges of precision medicine trials around targeted patient recruitment, emerging trial design, and evolving policies
- Patient recruitment success rates: Up to 45% of study delays by six months or more can be attributed to patient recruitment challenges. Only 30% of patients that sign up stay on for entire length of the study.
- Expanding trial duration: 150% increase in number of eligibility criteria in the last 10 years; treatment period increased by 25% since 2000
- Escalating costs: More than $2 billion is spent annually on just patient recruitment efforts and delays. Nearly 100% of trials require timeline extensions for recruiting issues.
- About 80% of pharma clinical trials do not meet enrollment deadlines, resulting in an average loss up to $1.3 million per day for a given drug candidate. eRecruitment solutions will increase geographic access to recruit patients in a faster and more targeted way.”
Ko added that improved application of data technologies stands to transform the industry, moving it from the standard centralized model (which can face high costs and difficult-to-access settings) to more patient-centric, efficient decentralized models.
“Apart from optimizing IT systems, progressive vendors are also leveraging AI, blockchain, and predictive analytics capabilities to provide intuitive user interface by integrating all possible study/eSource data and augmenting clinical trial teams to shift from static to adaptive data management practices,” he said.
Also, Ko told OSP, when trial teams are seeking to accelerate patient recruitment, they should ask themselves two key questions:
- Are these solutions addressed directly to patients or healthcare professionals?
- Are these solutions capable of generating structured data in a prospective way?
“We often think AI or the technological aspect is the key for a digital tool to improve clinical trials processes, but I think that the real strength of a new tool lies in its daily adoption by patients or healthcare professionals,” he added. “We answer the two questions above by using a digital tool that is addressed to healthcare professionals in their routine work and that helps them to structure their patient data; we think that is the best way to create a bridge between clinical research and daily patient care."
Cerba Research CEO Mario Papillon said his firm and its parent company, Cerba Healthcare, are keenly interested in “investing in technologies that will reduce the patient burden of participating in clinical trials and help our clients to accelerate their development strategy.”
“Biokortex will allow them to prospectively identify potential patients and offer them a safer alternative to access innovative treatments," said Papillon.
According to the two companies, potential benefits of the collaboration include:
- Leveraging patients’ biological and medical data, in addition to biomarker and genetic data from the Cerba Healthcare network, which includes more than 25m patients per year from more than 1,000 global sites
- Global reach with data on global testing, frequency, and accuracy
- Platform for screening and companion diagnostic testing across Europe and Africa