The Roles of Central and Local Labs in Clinical Trials

In a recent interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Kelli Aufderheide, director, laboratory decentralized trial solutions, IQVIA Laboratories, discussed the benefits of central and local labs for clinical trials. Central labs offer harmonized test menus, standardized data collection, and global reach, ensuring consistent results across labs. Local labs, often co-located with investigator sites, provide quick turnaround times crucial for urgent patient care. In a world of complex clinical trials, stakeholders should support sites by focusing on planning, training, and incorporating feedback to streamline processes and reduce manual work.

A transcript of Aufderheide’s conversation with ACT can be found below.

ACT: What are some of the key aspects of each type of lab that are important for clinical trials, sites, and sponsors?

Aufderheide: In looking at clinical trials from a central lab perspective, the key benefits are really around the globally harmonized test menu, so the reference ranges are aligned, any flagging that is necessary, the data collection, the data provision to the sponsor—all of that is aligned and harmonized across all of our various labs. The central lab kit supplies, so anything that a site is going to need to be able to collect a sample is all provided, hopefully in a nice little package, depending on the central lab I guess you're working with. Really, the benefits, a focus of sponsors, and making sure that we're providing everything that the site would need and primarily focusing on everything that is needed to provide patient care, start to finish, in a collection or in a visit.

From a local lab perspective, a lot of these labs are close to the investigator sites. The investigators are familiar with them. Sometimes they are physically at the investigator site, if it's like a large hospital or a large facility. They provide fast turnaround time. The lab is within your facility, you're able to get those results quickly and inform patient care. Sometimes, in some scenarios, that can be really critical for the patients, to get those results back quickly, and just making sure that the investigator has everything that they need in a timely manner. The investigator sites also often are very familiar with these local labs. They work with them on a regular basis, a lot of times in their non-clinical trials, if they have just routine testing that they're doing, they're working with these same labs that are providing this testing for them.