In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Iddo Peleg, CEO and co-founder at Yonalink, discussed the impact of recent FDA and NIH actions on clinical trials. With changes in funding and DEI initiatives, there is a need to make trials more accessible for patients. Peleg highlighted how advancements in technology could address this, not only increasing accessibility, but efficiency as well.
ACT: Are there any new opportunities to be had in light of the recent changes from the FDA and NIH? If so, what?
Peleg: I think the key to saving life is efficiency, and there is a lot of talk about making things more efficient. How can we shift the money to the right places, or how, in general, can we promote efficiency in clinical trials? The key for that, and I think this is going to be the approach, is the technology. Because of the technology, we can buy anything from anywhere in the world, we can shift things, and technology can do some amazing things, but in clinical trials, even though we have thousands of different technical vendors, at the end of the day, the majority of the medical centers are still copying data from one screen to another. We have CRAs traveling all over the world to do STVs, which is insane. This is the last market that we are still copying data manually, and people are sitting still and verifying that the data was captured correctly. This means that we have no or very limited efficiency in clinical trials and the climate of being more efficient can promote very advanced technologies, and try to think to do things differently. I think this is the key clinical trials, and I really hope that this will be enabled to promote all kinds of new technologies in clinical trials, because the companies are there. I think it’s more from pharma, from the FDA, to adopt very advanced technology to make clinical trials more efficient and to bring them to the to the modern era because right now, we’re stuck 20 years behind.