In this interview for PCT TV we asked Anna Matranga, Strategic Sourcing R&D at AMC Alliances & Consulting, to predict how clinical trials will change in the next five to ten years. She picked out six areas she thinks will see the biggest change.
1) Patient involvement - 'Looking at clinical trials, historically we have done a lot around the clinical endpoints, but we are also now looking at quality of life and we are taking more of a holistic approach to the wellbeing of the patients.'
2) Diagnostics - 'We're now into therapeutic areas and disease areas where we're looking at prediction, prevention and personalized medicine. So I think we're going to see a lot more activity in diagnostics.'
3) Investigator/Patient relationship - 'With all of these wearables, what we should see is that the patient is coming less into the clinic as we're doing the evaluations at home. But the time that they do come into the clinic is an opportunity to really for them to have that time with the investigator or the doctor to really have a collaborative approach in terms of how they manage their own disease or condition.'
4) Aging population - 'In 2018 more than 10% of the world's population is going to be over 65. We've talked historically about pediatric studies, we now need to think about geriatric studies and make sure we have a representative percentage of that clinical trial population that is coming in over the 65 age and that we have significant sub-group sample sizes that we can deal with the treatment of that population.'
5) Implementation excellence - 'We need to be thinking about the appropriate place for innovation and the appropriate place for excellence in implementation. For us excellence in implementation is implicit - that's what we work towards every day, but sometime we forget about it as we constantly talk about innovation. We need to focus in on both, not just one'.
6) Endpoints - 'We need to spend more time up-front on the discussions around the clinical trial protocol, with the right key stakeholders in identifying those clinical endpoints that we measure that are few and meaningful. Today we talk about big data, and that's extremely important, but it needs to be around the right endpoints and we need to step away from that safety net of trying to collect everything just in case. I don't see it yet, but I'm an advocate for it. It needs to be lobbied and promoted across the industry.'
This interview was filmed at Partnerships in Clinical Trials Europe in Nov 2017.