Big Pharma consortium rolls out clinical trial investigator platform

Print 27 January 2016
Nick Paul Taylor / Fierce Biotech IT

Big Pharma consortium TransCelerate BioPharma has released a portal through which research sites can interact with multiple clinical trial sponsors. The portal is intended to free clinical trial sites from the duplicated workload and administrative burdens associated with using a different portal for each of the sponsors with which they work.

TransCelerate, a R&D-focused consortium made up of Pfizer ($PFE) and many other leading drugmakers, expects "several" of its members to adopt the platform in the near term. Such uptake is essential if the platform is to deliver on its stated goal of reducing administrative burdens borne by clinical trial sites. As it stands, trial sites use multiple portals and logins to connect to the sponsors that put work their way. At best, this is a cumbersome way of working. At worst, it forces sites to perform similar administrative tasks for multiple sponsors.

The Shared Investigator Platform (SIP) team at TransCelerate view such work as an avoidable and redundant burden that is stopping sites from getting on with more important tasks. "SIP benefits the patient by reducing the amount of time investigators dedicate to onerous administrative tasks, elevating the focus on the patient experience--a critical element to a trial's overall success and a key strategic priority for TransCelerate," Jackie Kent, an Eli Lilly ($LLY) employee who leads the SIP team, said in a statement.

Lilly has been working toward this point for around five years, having embarked on a project to share investigator training information with Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ) and Merck ($MRK) back in 2012. That initiative led to the creation of an investigator registry (IR) overseen by TransCelerate that links up to SIP. Profiles from SIP sit alongside data from TransCelerate members, the DrugDev investigator network, public information and other third-party sources in IR, giving its users access to a resource to support the identification and recruitment of clinical trial sites.

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