Making Clinical Trials More Accessible in Light of Recent FDA, NIH Policy Changes

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Iddo Peleg, CEO and co-founder at Yonalink, discussed the impact of recent FDA and NIH actions on clinical trials. With changes in funding and DEI initiatives, there is a need to make trials more accessible for patients. Peleg highlighted how advancements in technology could address this, not only increasing accessibility, but efficiency as well.

ACT: What was your initial reaction to the FDA removing its diversity webpages and the recent NIH funding cuts?

Peleg: When we're looking at clinical trials and when we want to think about if things that have been done are right or wrong, we need to look at the big picture. The number of clinical trials that were done in 2024, it's similar, or even less than in 2019. This means that in five years we didn't have any market growth, which is quite weird, and we need to find out why. We had some jump during COVID, but this is not the reality, the pandemic, when we talk about year-to-year growth. We need to think, what is the reason that we do not see growth in the clinical trial market, that there is a different reason for that. I think one of the things that's very important is to think if we had all types of roadblocks, something that prevented from the market to growth, and to shift the efforts of the FDA, of the NIH, to the right things in order to generate growth of the market, to make more clinical trials, to bring more new therapies to the patients. I think the aim is, when we are thinking about what the best approach is, is eventually to make clinical trials accessible to any patient, anywhere in the United States, so definitely we need to change things. All the changes, I think we need to make them, to make sure that all of them are with the aim to generate more clinical trials, to bring more therapies to the market faster, and to make clinical trials accessible to any patient anywhere.