Sustainability by Design

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Theirry Escudier, Portfolio Lead, Pistoia Alliance, discussed the alliance’s newest initiative to assess the carbon footprint of clinical trials. The initiative aims to answer whether decentralized clinical trials positively or negatively impact carbon footprints. Escudier also discussed how clinical research stakeholders are slowly beginning to adopt more sustainability practices, focusing on reducing waste and costs.

ACT: In terms of sustainability, how have clinical research stakeholders been responding to challenges such as operational costs?

Escudier: If you start to think differently and looking to what do I need, really, in my trial? Once again, it's also part of the overall new concept, but it's not anymore really in the EU now on the patient centricity and patient engagement is, if we think, in the place of the patient, what matters for them, and it's one of the reasons we have so much concern in terms of patient recruitment. It's also well known that in most of the trials there is difficulty to recruit patients and/or to keep them in a trial, because sometimes there is too much burden. If you start to think differently, thinking more on the on the patient side, then you also start to think on the way you can design your trial. Maybe you can reduce some of the visits. Do you really need to have all those patient visits in the flow chart? Like maybe we can keep the visit, but we could have, I would say, a phone call, instead of asking the patient to cross the city, to go to the hospital, all those things, and in particular, with the technology, because now you could even have those Zoom calls, Teams calls that you can even put in place. You could also have all those new tools that you can give to the patient on those apps that will remind what they have to do, when they have to come, what type of data they have to record, so there is maybe some new ways of thinking on designing your trial, so that's what we call now sustainability by design. Instead of doing what we have been doing forever, can we think differently in maybe designing the trial somewhat differently, of course, keeping the most important, that is to say, ensuring that the safety of the patient and being able to assess the efficacy, because that's the rationale of doing those clinical trials, but maybe if you do that a little bit differently, you could act on two sides, reducing the cost in a way, reducing the carbon footprint, and at the end, it's a win-win situation for everyone.