Grahame Smith Prize Lecture

The Grahame Smith Prize Lecture presented at Pharmacology 2019 - Clinical trials now and in the future

Speaker: Professor Isla Mackenzie, University of Dundee, UK

Chair: Professor Thomas Macdonald, University of Dundee, UK

Clinical trials are key to expanding the evidence base in medicine, leading to improvements in patient care. Traditionally, clinical trials involve multiple visits by each participant to one or more central research sites.

Recruitment is often slow, resource intensive and costly. Significant burden is placed on participants to attend study visits, often travelling long distances and involving major and inflexible time commitments. Some patients are excluded from participation due to practical issues such as geographical distance from recruiting site, health problems restricting ability to travel or personal commitments.

In MEMO Research, University of Dundee, they have developed various approaches to making clinical trials more streamlined and cost-effective, including making use of remote methods of recruitment and consent, information technology advances and using patient reported outcomes and routinely collected NHS data for endpoint detection and pharmacovigilance purposes. Coupled with major advances in devices and data collection and management possibilities, the future of clinical trials looks very different. Challenges include how we can influence the landscape of trial governance and regulation to enable these innovations in trial design to be implemented.

In this lecture, Isla reviews recent developments in this area and discusses the future of remote decentralised clinical trials.

[Toby]

Thank you for this. I’m learning more about pharmaceuticals due to becoming an enrolled nurse. I am a waterpolo player too. It’s a great game and yes it does get a little rough under water. But it adds to the game. You have to act pretty good for the the referee 🙂