Given that clinical trials represent the biggest pain point for drug development from the painstakingly slow recruitment process and the need to find the most suitable candidates, it’s interesting to see how companies are taking on the challenge in their own unique way. This week, three different companies made news this week as to how they were trying to improve the recruitment experience for patients and for pharma companies.
The health team at Facebook, a social network which has previously hinted in various ways that it interested in being more involved in healthcare, hosted a breakfast for drug marketers to explain a new clinical trial strategy thiis week. It talked about how drug companies can use its vast network to identify and find clinical trial candidates and stay on the right side of the law, according to a CNBC article.
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Organizations such as the Michael J Fox Foundation have been able to save money and make recruitment more efficient by advertising for clinical trials on the website. Last year MJFF found they were able to save a boatload on the cost of ads compared with traditional advertising strategies and the organization was able to boost recruitment substantially.
This week, Antidote Technologies raised $11 million in a Series A round for its clinical trial matching business led by Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and with participation from existing investors Smedvig Capital and Octopus Ventures.
Antidote has a clinical trial search tool for more than 180 patient communities and health portals in the U.S. and UK. Users fill out a questionnaire so they can identify the most relevant clinical trials nearby. Some of the company’s clinical trial tools are highlighted on its website. For example, an “Antidote Bridge” gives procedure descriptions, the number of overnight stays, placebo use, and financial compensation details to patients for each trial. Antidote API helps to screen patients for several clinical trials at once. The fundraise will help the business harness data from EHRs for its trial matching platform towards precision medicine.
The clinical trial matching service contends that 80 percent of clinical trials are forced to shut down prematurely because they don’t recruit enough participants. The idea is to make it easier for patients to find relevant trials, as well as doctors and nurses. Still, physicians and nurses said they frequently decline to refer patients to clinical trials because of the inability to access information or insufficient information is available about clinical trials, according to a January report from Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development.
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VitalTrax this week launched Wing, a product designed to simplify the task of finding trials with a user friendly interface. Users can search for trials by clicking on fundamental criteria such as gender, location, and condition, but they can also select the status of the study, the type of trial, and the phase of the clinical trial. The layout and the options are less confusing than, say, a search of clinical trials.gov.
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