The past year brought many changes for Trialbee. We doubled the size of our business, doubled the number of top 10 clients, and officially launched our flagship product, Honey. We were able bring in top talent to grow and enhance our leadership team. None of this would have been possible without the hard work and dedication to our mission shown by our talented team of professionals. Everyone at Trialbee is driven to make clinical trial recruitment work better for our customers, and we are energized by the successes of the last year.
That said, Trialbee is poised and ready to take on the challenges and opportunities of 2022. Our industry continues to evolve, and we are in a unique position to help create better research experiences for all stakeholders.
The Technology to Make Patient-centered Trials Reality
Effective recruitment, as we all know, is vital to conducting successful clinical trials. This has been the driving force behind everything we do at Trialbee. While much has been said about participant retention and the impact of improved patient experience, it is also important to make the recruitment experience work better. By doing so, we can expand access to a much larger group of patients – reaching far beyond geographic constraints to inform and educate people about research opportunities wherever they are. This allows Trialbee to find patients most likely to meet eligibility criteria, more quickly. Our technology also helps to target those patients who are most motivated, leading to better retention and shortening the time needed to reach endpoint goals. By creating a process that engages the right patients from the moment they learn about a study through the recruitment process, simplifying their path to randomization, we are building recruitment that works for everyone, for any disease.
Decentralization Moving from Novel Approach to Standard Operating Procedure
While COVID-19 continues to complicate our lives and work in many ways, it has helped to push our industry forward in an important way. With healthcare centers overwhelmed during COVID surges throughout the pandemic, it became unsafe for many patients to make in-person clinical visits. Researchers, seeking ways to keep trials moving, began adopting decentralized clinical trial (DCT) approaches en masse, which allowed patients to stay home while still contributing data. This explosion in DCT utilization has educated sponsors and other stakeholders very quickly about the benefits of remote data collection. Apart from simple trial continuation or being able to start new trials during the pandemic, DCTs also demonstrated their ability to expand study recruitment efforts far beyond traditional clinical trial sites. Regulatory endorsement of DCT modalities served as the much-needed catalyst for allowing our risk-averse industry to innovate faster. With geography no longer a constraint to recruitment, new recruiting models have risen that help to target, identify, and reach best-fit patients. With DCTs now becoming commonplace, recruitment innovations such as Trialbee Honey are uniquely suited to populate these studies.
The Ability to Target Can Transform Patient Representation
Clinical trials have long struggled, not only recruiting enough patients in general, but recruiting populations of patients who are representative of real-world users of the approved therapy. Technology like Honey, that uses data to identify the most effective recruitment strategies for finding ideal patients and effectively shepherds them through the recruitment and enrollment process, allows us to focus on the specific types of patient demographics needed for a study. This is important, as regulators are increasing their scrutiny around this issue, as was witnessed during the race to develop and test COVID-19 vaccines. Today’s guidance and recommendations will become tomorrow’s regulations, but compliance is only one piece of the problem. There are powerful societal benefits for making clinical research more diverse, such as improving access to research as a healthcare option for a broader group of people and restoring trust among historically skeptical groups.
New Paradigms in Research Demand More Sophisticated Solutions
Advances in technology and process continue to transform research. In 2022, I believe we will see real progress toward the goal of making on-time enrollment a standard. For many years, sponsors have accepted that recruitment always takes a very long time and that it is normal for timelines to be stretched. At Trialbee we have already seen that our Honey solution helps to dramatically speed the recruitment process, helping customers to meet their deadlines. This is now possible through a combination of patient-centered thinking – doing the work to understand who a study’s patients are – and using advanced data science to reach those people with recruitment messages that resonate. In time, I think sponsors will find that old processes, like hiring many recruitment partners to cast the widest net possible, are inefficient. By identifying inefficiencies like this and eliminating them, we can lower the cost of clinical research and bring new therapies to market faster.
