Clinical Operations & Strategy

Download the case study and learn how Quest Diagnostics and PatientsLikeMe helped accelerate recruitment and enrollment for a struggling study.

From planning one Phase III trial at a time to digital standardization on repeat.

In this Q&A, Sam Hinsley, statistics manager at Phastar, discusses the role statisticians play in raising standards across the clinical development timeline—and why getting early phase decisions right is critical to the entire drug development pathway.

Optimization challenges spurring cultural, strategic, and organizational change.

Study coordinators identify only about 45% of critical and major problems during document reviews, with substantial performance variability across experience levels, but focused training can improve detection rates from 45% to approximately 68%.

Despite political headwinds, life sciences leaders are holding their ground on DEI, but translating organizational commitment into representative enrollment requires structural changes to protocol design, site selection, and community engagement that most of the industry has yet to fully make.

In this Q&A, Adrelia Allen, executive director of clinical trial patient diversity at Merck, discusses how the company is embedding diversity into clinical trial execution—from protocol design and site selection to long-term community engagement that extends well beyond individual trial timelines.

The CNPV program has compressed drug review timelines to as little as one to two months for qualifying sponsors, but succeeding under that pressure requires a fundamental rethink of how development teams plan, communicate, and execute.

Clinical Trials Day is an international celebration of everyone who makes medical discoveries possible. It is also an opportunity to shine a light on the innovations helping to keep research rising.

As imaging-heavy clinical trials grow more complex and globally distributed, sponsors are increasingly re-evaluating traditional infrastructure models, with cloud-native platforms showing potential to reduce operational burden, accelerate site activation, improve imaging quality oversight, and lower total trial costs.

From payment delays and feasibility misalignment to technology burden and AI adoption, clinical research sites are navigating a convergence of pressures that increasingly determine who sponsors work with and how well trials perform.

Zentails announced the first dosage of Azenosertib administered in its phase III Aspenova trial to test azenosertib vs chemotherapy in Cyclin E1-positive platinum-resistant ovarian cancer.

Integrating technology and collaboration to close the evidence gap.

Payment experience—including timeliness, transparency, and consistency—is emerging as a key operational factor influencing site financial stability, working relationships with sponsors and CROs, and overall clinical trial execution.

In this Q&A, Jenna DiRito, PhD, COO and co-founder of Revalia Bio, discusses how earlier, human-relevant data is reshaping go/no-go decision-making in drug development and what a truly front-loaded workflow looks like in practice.

In this Q&A, Krishna Cheriath, VP and head of clinical research digital data and AI at Thermo Fisher Scientific, examines how AI is reshaping clinical operations—from case intake and trial design to site burden reduction and the emerging reality of agentic AI in the workforce.

In this video compilation, industry experts share their perspectives on the operational, technological, and methodological shifts defining clinical research in 2026.

In part 3 of this three-part series, behavioral science reveals that clinical trial diversity cannot be achieved through last-minute recruitment efforts, but requires designing protocols, sites, and enrollment strategies around the real barriers and needs of underrepresented communities from the outset.

Risk-based monitoring requires integrated data systems, validated analytics, and strong governance to work effectively across global trials, but sponsors face significant technical and operational challenges that demand strategic solutions and organizational alignment.

Digital twin technology can reliably simulate standard-of-care treatment outcomes using historical clinical trial data, offering a practical pathway to virtual control arms that reduce recruitment burden and address ethical concerns around placebo designs.

In this video interview, Cheryl Kole, vice president of solution strategy and commercialization at Almac Clinical Technologies, offers a framework for thinking about which emerging trial complexities deserve to be built into core technology platforms and which are better managed as bespoke, one-off configurations.

As clinical trials grow more complex, the technology infrastructure supporting them is under renewed scrutiny. Across data validation, AI adoption, and site-based systems, 2026 is shaping up as a year of implementation rather than experimentation.

In this video interview, Cheryl Kole, vice president of solution strategy and commercialization at Almac Clinical Technologies, discusses why sponsors must integrate their digital and physical supply chains as a single operational flow and how to build the in-house capabilities and partner relationships needed to manage that complexity effectively.