inVentiv Clinical Trial Recruitment Solutions (iCTRS) has teamed up with the ViS Research Institute, a New York-based company specialising in data analytics for clinical-study planning, to “revolutionise” what it calls the “antiquated system” of clinical-trial site evaluation.
iCTRS is a specialist service offering recently launched by inVentiv Health, the US-based provider of clinical development, commercialisation and consulting services.
It merges InVentiv’s proprietary database, communications expertise and digital technologies to help clinical-trial sponsors accelerate patient recruitment, improve site productivity and reduce study timelines.
US$10 billion hit
By overhauling the site-feasibility process, the strategic partnership with ViS Research takes aim at a planning problem estimated to squander US$10 billion a year in clinical-trial costs.
The partners will build on ViS Research’s existing online feasibility platform, whereby trial planners use interactive visualisations to navigate a disease-specific decision matrix and to gather feasibility information on more than 400,000 research sites and over 320,000 investigators.
iCTRS and ViS will co-develop advanced proprietary features for the platform, including automation of the Confidential Disclosure Agreement workflow and final sign-off, as well as enhanced analytical capabilities so that users can rapidly compare feasibility information between sites.
Analytics gap
As things stand, trial planners “simply don’t have adequate analytics about research centres and locations where centres operate”, iCTRS says.
The relevant information “is often inaccurate and outdated – or simply does not exist. To find the right trial site, across more than 400,000 research centres worldwide, trial planners send out lengthy feasibility questionnaires, often on paper, that are frequently never filled out or returned”.
As iCTRS explains, ViS uses sophisticated algorithms and semantic technologies to generate analytics about trial-centre locations. These analytics are validated by local experts and integrated with crowd-sourced input from clinical research centres through ViS’s social network.
Disease-specific
Through its partnership with ViS Research, iCTRS is opening up access to an interactive navigation system that enables trial planners to match their needs with the disease-specific capabilities of individual research centres.
“They can quickly and efficiently evaluate all the relevant analytics – such as local patient population, research activity, infrastructure, personnel, timelines – from the country level through state, city, postal code, all the way down to what is inside the research centre’s facilities,” iCTRS notes
“The entire feasibility process has needed revamping, and in partnering with iCTRS we expand our ability to deliver greater efficiency to the industry through innovative technologies in analysis, visualisation, and networking,” commented Dr Fabio Thiers, founder and chief executive officer of ViS Research.
According to Thiers, using these technologies could reduce waste in global clinical research by 10-15%.
