National pharmacies, retail health clinics, physician practices and trial tech companies are emerging as significant disruptors to the traditional clinical trial delivery model, according to a November PwC report.
COVID-19 disrupted the process of conducting clinical trials at hospitals and academic medical centers, giving the biopharma industry a chance to accelerate delivery approaches through methods including local, at-home and virtual options.
These new entrants have access to larger numbers of patients; PwC's Health Research Institute found that 67 percent of consumers said they are less likely to participate in a clinical trial for COVID-19 treatment if they had to travel outside of their local area to get to a trial site, according to the report.
"Increased access to patients allows for the acceleration of recruitment and the ability to start up fully-scaled trial delivery capacity in days or weeks versus months," the report states. "The convenience of location and increased access improves flexibility for patients, ultimately reducing the patient dropout rate."
Four signs that retail disruptors will become mainstream players in clinical trial delivery market:
1. The COVID-19 pandemic and vaccination race elevated the biopharma industry to the national stage, opening the door for large players to invest in decentralized trials. Companies including Medable, Science 37 and Thread have all received more than $100 million in respective funding rounds.
2. Decentralized trials support business continuity strategies and prevent widespread disruptions caused by issues such as COVID-19 from occurring.
3. Global agencies led by the FDA and Europe, the Middle East and Africa are accelerating guidance to support different regulatory and compliance standards for decentralized trials.
4. Biopharma companies have started investing in strategies to build necessary infrastructure such as processes and technology needed to scale decentralized trials across their platforms.