The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world we live in and propelled the clinical trials industry into the future like never before. We’ve witnessed significant collaboration among industry groups, as 2020 and early 2021 saw the development and regulatory approval of three vaccines to prevent COVID-19. The two vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech received FDA approval and, along with the vaccine from AstraZeneca/University of Oxford, regulatory approval from agencies in other countries. In a recently announced partnership, Sanofi will manufacture the COVID-19 vaccine developed by BioNTech/Pfizer.
The urgency for a vaccine to be developed meant that organizations needed to recruit and enroll as many relevant, motivated participants as possible to ensure safety and efficacy. And while diversity (or lack thereof) has been a topic of discussion in clinical research for some time, COVID-19 has amplified the issue because of its disproportionate effect on the elderly and racial and ethnic minorities.
To fulfill a commitment to diversity and inclusion of participants from historically underrepresented communities and disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 in the Phase 3 COVE study of its COVID-19 vaccine, Moderna leveraged TrialScope Connect, a participant referral collective comprised of multiple patient recruitment firms working together to rapidly find, screen, and enroll clinical trial participants into Moderna’s study. As a result, by October 2020, the study included more than 11,000 participants from communities of color, reflecting U.S. demographics.
Trialbee is proud to have collaborated with other industry recruitment firms to help ensure the Moderna COVID-19 study enrolled a diverse population in its aim to demonstrate safety and efficacy for everyone. Trialbee’s highly adaptive outreach technique, based on real-world data (RWD), directs recruitment outreach to geographic “hot spots” to quickly identify participants that reflect a representative patient population.
The speed at which the Moderna vaccine got to market was only possible through the collaboration of organizations across the industry. At Trialbee, we refer to this as the “Power of We,” a collaborative approach to making the drug development path simpler and more predictable — in terms of timelines, cost, and quality. The power really comes from everyone bringing their specific expertise to the approach, because no single organization owns and controls this entire process, making it challenging to operate in a silo.
Learn more about the “Power of We,” a collaborative, data-driven approach to transforming clinical trials in this on-demand webinar.
