Outsourcing
Trial and error O
ver the past few years, the pandemic has swept aside old ways of living – from how we work to how we see our friends. But change is not always a bad thing, and one silver lining has been the arrival of innovative new ways to work. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the sphere of clinical trials. Consider research timelines. Before Covid, trials typically took six months to implement and a year to recruit participants. Twelve months into the pandemic and those numbers were slashed in half. The same story can be told for drug approval. Less than a year after Covid was
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sequenced, EU and US regulators gave emergency approval to a trio of vaccines. To put that into perspective, it typically took around a decade for new medications to be greenlit pre-pandemic. Nor, of course, are these shifts particularly hard to appreciate. With borders closed and economies tanking, it was imperative for researchers to understand the virus they were up against and hone vaccines to protect against it. And as those references to border closures imply, there were other pressures too. How could traditional clinical trials survive, for instance, when lockdowns stopped
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Covid-19 transformed clinical trials practically overnight, with remote testing and quicker approvals suddenly becoming a reality the world over. These shifts aren’t hard to understand. Eager to defeat the pandemic as quickly as possible, researchers were happy to embrace change for financial and efficiency reasons. But with the pandemic finally passing into history, can we expect the revolutions of 2020 to transform clinical trials over the long term? Andrea Valentino talks to Professor Kenneth Getz, at the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, to learn more.
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