The clinical trials market worldwide reached $80.7 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow at a rate of about 6.5 percent from 2024 to 2030, according to a report by Grand View Research. As clinical trials at all phases accelerate, the need to avoid costly delays and speed time to market is urgent.
Automation in clinical trials is helping to reduce errors and speed trial startup and planning as well as early-phase processes. By streamlining the study build process, clinical trial teams can reduce overall time to market for new therapies.
Meeting Time to Market Challenges
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how essential it is to streamline medical research and bring new therapies to market promptly. Clinical trials play an indispensable role in this process.
“High-quality randomised clinical trials are more essential than ever to ensure that the limited resources available are used most efficiently to deliver effective health interventions,” write Martin J. Landray, Richard Haynes, and Christina Reith in a 2023 article in The Lancet.
Yet in the early stages of clinical trials, many steps move anything but smoothly. Time spent on patient recruitment can equal up to one-third of the study’s total length, writes Matthew Hutson in Nature — and 20 percent of clinical trials don’t reach their recruitment goals. Patients also drop out during the clinical trial process, sometimes at high rates, which can further lengthen the time needed to complete a clinical trial with usable data.
These and other challenges have prompted clinical trial sponsors to seek ways to accelerate clinical trial timelines while also managing costs. Increasing patient enrollment and site engagement can support these goals, write Gaurav Agrawal and fellow researchers at McKinsey. Automating a number of other clinical trial tasks can also save time and speed a clinical trial toward successful completion.
How Automation Speeds Time to Market
Automation can speed both the set-up and the execution of early phase clinical trials, write Rita Cardoso and fellow authors at McKinsey. For example, automated digital solutions can:
- Make it easier for clinical trial participants to identify themselves, share information, and avoid making errors such as leaving information out, or unnecessarily creating duplicate applications.
- Facilitate creating participant and control groups, sorting candidates automatically by relevant factors like health factors or geographic location.
- Reduce time spent on clinical trial set-up by providing templates for study protocols, questions, and event reporting.
- Minimize the need for manual review of data by flagging omissions, accidental repetition of entered information, or fields in which information may have been entered incorrectly.
- Saving time in recordkeeping with digital workflows, error flagging, and consistent structures that rely on a single source of truth, allowing for faster adaptation should circumstances or schedules change mid-clinical trial.
Clinical trial data is most valuable when close attention is paid to detail — yet this kind of attention takes time, which can slow down early phase clinical trials. Automated digital solutions can help streamline detail-oriented data and information work, allowing clinical trial teams to focus on the work and the patients in front of them.
Choosing Digital Solutions for Clinical Trial Automation
The early stages of clinical trial planning and early phase execution are full of opportunities to speed time to market for new therapies.
As the leading Early Phase Source and site automation solution for clinical trial sites, AnjuEPS offers automated features that help clinical trial teams reduce time to market. AnjuEPS’s features include:
- Sample tracking tools, comprising solutions for tracking barcoded samples within a single, touchscreen-compatible, user-friendly interface and tools for identifying and tracking the contents of laboratory storage at a glance.
- Subject recruitment solutions, including a configurable recruitment module that makes it easy to identify and group potential candidates or control groups, search tools to connect the right subjects to the right studies, and robust communication tools to keep clinical trial participants engaged and on track.
- Self-registration tools for patients that can be integrated directly into a website, allowing subjects to register themselves, provide their own information, express interest in specific studies, or answer study-related questions. Automated duplicate detection helps ensure accurate information for each patient.
- Faster study builds with automated elements in the AnjuEPS QuickStart library make clinical trial set-up faster with answers, events, questions, and entire study protocols ready to adapt or implement.
- Make quick mid-study changes through AnjuEPS, which allows multiple databases to share the same global library. Adapt clinical schedules in AnjuEPS with confidence that the information will reach everyone who needs it.
AnjuEPS’s intuitive design and build module makes it easy to set up a clinical trial and move into Phase I trials without reinventing the wheel. AnjuEPS can be accessed on a wide range of devices, balancing security and compliance demands with a user-friendly interface.
Bringing new products to market quickly is a must. AnjuEPS helps clinical trial teams set up and carry out early phase trials efficiently, speeding time to market.
Images used under license by Shutterstock.com.
Authored by Laura Acosta, VP of Product Management, eClinical Division
Laura Acosta, VP of Product Management for Anju’s eClinical Division, brings over 25 years of experience in life sciences software, including significant roles at Oracle Health Sciences. With academic credentials from Boston University and Tufts University in Computer Science, Laura excels in navigating the complexities of eClinical solutions. Her commitment to continuous learning and innovation has earned her recognition as a trusted leader in the field. Connect with Laura on LinkedIn to explore her expertise further.