One of the most important aspects of any clinical trial is ensuring the safety of participants. This means there must be clear channels of communication between clinicians and patients. A new mobile technology aims to assist in this process and more generally improve the speed and efficiency of clinical research.
New Technology
Parexel International Corporation is a biopharmaceutical firm based in Boston. It is currently looking to develop mobile and wearable technology to assist with clinical research and drug development. Recently, it announced a range of new products as part of this endeavour, all based around the Perceptive Cloud platform.
One notable new product utilises Microsoft’s Azure App Services. It will allow clinicians and healthcare teams to receive data from patients in a quicker and more efficient manner. This in turn should alert them to any immediate threat to the patient’s safety, and therefore reduce the possibility of serious injury or death to patients. As there are strict rules around the conducting of clinical trials in the United Kingdom to ensure patient safety, this is an important step.
Other technological improvements include an expansion of Parexel’s available platforms. Both Clinphone and DataLabs (an electronic technology for data capture) will be able to connect with Parexel’s patient sensor. Artificial intelligence may also be able to help the sensor transfer data and predict patient adherence during trials. Any technology that can assist in adaptive phase 1 clinical studies, such as those carried out by https://www.richmondpharmacology.com/specialist-services/adaptive-phase-i-studies, will be a welcome way to improve research quality.
Other Research
Another way in which Parexel has researched the potential of wearables in clinical trials is in collaboration with the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi. They aimed to combine their expertise, whether clinical, logistical, regulatory or technical, to study how wearables could speed up the drug development process.
Digital technology is becoming an important focus in life science research. Parexel is not the only company to experiment with mobile and wearable devices or artificial intelligence. One start-up at UC Berkley recently announced a collaboration with Sanofi to use artificial intelligence to search through studies and find those that are most relevant to pharmaceutical companies and their stakeholders.
At the Bio2018 Conference, many experts expressed the hope that collaborations between life science companies and digital companies could lead to further improvements in data collection and study efficiency.
