In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Dipanwita Das, CEO & co-founder at Sorcero, discussed advancements and future trends in clinical trials. Key challenges include high costs, long timelines, lack of diversity, and rigid protocols. Das highlighted technological advancements such as AI, real-time monitoring, and historical data analysis, which are all expected to optimize trial design and patient recruitment in 2025 and beyond.
ACT: Looking back at 2024, what advancements in clinical technology are you most proud of the industry for achieving?
Das: Well, I think a lot of advancements and progress has been made in the patient matching and recruitment. We’ve successfully seen industry use AI (artificial intelligence) to analyze electronic health records to more effectively identify eligible trial participants and I think that’s really important. Also, finding the right participants before you’re able to target them. That’s the other point that’s been really difficult to do, is that personalization and the targeting. Real-time data monitoring saw a lot of progress as well in using AI to stay abreast in real time, instead of being able to circumvent potential hurdles and issues as they show up, rather than six, eight, 10 months after the effect, which would add absolutely years to the length of a trial and the complexity thereof, and also make it more expensive. We’ve seen a lot of progress in design optimization, where you’re actually using more historical trial data to reflect on how future trials of similar compounds or similar therapies can be optimized and of course, the dream of decentralized trials, diversity needs a lot of work to actually be instrumented and implemented and I think investment in more decentralization and hybrid trials, we’ve seen some great progress in that as well in the course of 2024.