Embrace New Technologies in Trial Design to Reduce Risk and Save Costs

While breakthroughs in genomics and systems biology have created a surge of promising new therapies, the cost per new drug approval has exploded 145 percent over a 10-year period.1 Despite these increases, only about seven percent of compounds tried for the first time in humans gained approval.1 To make matters worse, numerous promising drug candidates are not being developed due to the system’s gross inefficiencies, which have rendered clinical development risky and often economically non-viable.

This paper has outlined four ways to successfully guide and reshape clinical trials to meet the needs of our ever changing social, economic and regulatory climate. They include: (1) implementing adaptive trial designs, (2) partnering with trial sites, (3) adopting EMR-driven patient recruitment and tracking, and (4) leveraging mobile technologies.