Accelerating Patient Recruitment in Clinical Trials
31 July 2006, NetworkPharma Ltd, Oxford, UK have published the latest in their KeywordPharma series of brand new conference reports intended for individuals working in and around the global pharmaceutical industry.
Accelerating Patient Recruitment in Clinical Trials; in-depth report from the SMi conference, London, 27-28 March 2006 is now available for purchase.
All pharmaceutical companies want to find cost savings. The industry conducts large numbers of clinical trials each year. Regulatory requirements, as well as other scientific and marketing needs, mean that many of these studies continue to need ever-larger numbers of patients. The cost of running trials is now approaching 30% of pharmaceutical companies’ entire drug development budgets. However, 75% of patient studies fail to make their timelines, often causing expensive delays in regulatory approval and market launch. Slow patient recruitment represents a major reason for this, as does poor retention of patients within ongoing clinical trials. Close scrutiny of, and adherence to, a variety of factors that promote timely patient recruitment, however, mean that pharmaceutical companies have tangible mechanisms that can substantially enhance their profi tability. The 2nd Annual Conference on Accelerating Patient Recruitment in Clinical Trials, held in London 27-28 March 2006, organised by SMi, discussed a diverse range of approaches now used by some companies and their Contract Research Organisations to adhere to timelines, to shorten them, and to try to identify recently evolving best practices.
This Conference Insights review provides analysis of the pertinent issues raised in selected presentations made at this event, discussing proven strategies to maximise patient recruitment, tools to assist the process, investigator-site selection and public perceptions of clinical trials. It makes clear why the old method of opportunism in patient recruitment is not effective, and looks at why companies are starting to abandon expensive advertising campaigns in favour of evidence-based patient recruitment strategies.
From a business point of view, optimising patient recruitment and retention, with the aim of getting new products on the market as soon as possible, now represents an important, achievable goal for all pharmaceutical companies.
The author, Dr Richard Wyse, said: "Several companies shared how they benefit by the use of a range of support tools (patient databases, metrics and benchmarking, and cost-effectiveness analyses) to make better choices about their patient recruitment strategies (and their selection of investigator site where this impinges on rates of recruitment). Subsequently, some have now found out what works well and what doesn’t. The audience seemed fascinated to learn by these experiences."
All KeywordPharma publications can be purchased from ThePharmYard at www.ThePharmYard.com
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About the author
Dr Richard Wyse was formerly senior lecturer in paediatric cardiology at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, Richard now has joint commercial and academic careers. He is the author of over 100 medical and scientific papers, and pharmaceutical industry articles in journals. He has also written four industry books, and several independent evidence-based medicine reports in various therapeutic areas. Commercially, he has worked for a CRO as Director of European Health Economics, and as Medical Director for a US pharmaceutical IT company, and a medical device company. He has been involved in a wide variety of industry clinical trials and several other areas of drug development for many years. Academically, he is currently a visiting professor in Saudi Arabia and President-Elect of the Division of Genetics at the Royal Society of Medicine. He is on the editorial board of several journals.
Richard has spoken at many academic and international pharmaceutical and medical device conferences, and has chaired 25 of them. Notably, he was global chairman of a major cardiac patient database initiative that involved 2700 hospitals worldwide, speaking at national conferences in a large number of first- and third-world countries. In this capacity he reported a landmark paper on risk prediction and outcomes in more than 600,000 US patients.
Written by pharmaceutical industry specialists, KeywordPharma publications are designed to be authoritative, relevant, succinct and helpful to pharmaceutical industry executives in their day-to-day work and in their longer term career development. Available to purchase individually as e-documents, they build into a specialist knowledge library for everyone working in and around the global pharmaceutical industry.
Developed and managed by NetworkPharma Ltd, ThePharmYard provides instant access to a unique database of specialist information which is particularly relevant to individuals working within the medical and pharmaceutical industries around the world. Titles from a diverse range of independent publishers are available to purchase in electronic document format for immediate access.
NetworkPharma Ltd is an independent, specialist company founded by Peter Llewellyn, to focus on novel approaches to disseminating information within the global medical and pharmaceutical industries. Peter Llewellyn previously founded and built the leading industry portal site, InPharm, which was subsequently purchased by John Wiley & Sons to manage alongside their other industry services, PharmaFile and Pharmafocus.
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