Embrace Innovation To Dodge Rising Trial Costs

By David Hadden, President and Founder of Pro-ficiency

The cost of conducting a clinical trial has been rising in recent years and that trend shows no signs of abating anytime soon. And that means that the clinical research industry needs to overcome its traditional resistance to change and adopt innovations that can save both money and time to mitigate the impact of those rising costs.

But it’s not enough to merely adopt new technologies or other innovative practices and hope that costs go down. It is important to carefully select the innovations adopted based on four tests:

• Does it reduce cost and/or time?
• Does it cause creative destruction, or replacement of old processes with improved ones?
• Does it require doing business differently, in a better, more efficient way?
• Do users love it and actually use it?

The cost of everything is rising rapidly, and the cost of developing new pharmaceuticals is no exception. Increases in areas like food, gas and airfare play a role in the increased cost of pharma R&D, but clinical trials also face unique factors that add to their expense. According to 2021 estimates by Deloitte, the average cost of development has soared from $450 million in 2013 to $2.45 billion in 2020.[1]