Asia Pacific at the forefront of decentralized clinical trials

April 1, 2023

By Edwin Ng, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific, Life Science, Dassault Systèmes

Clinical trials industry has been moving towards decentralisation post the pandemic and Asia-Pacific, given its strategic importance for global healthcare firms, availability of diverse pool of clinical trial patients and high-or-increasing rate of technology adoption bode well for the region.

Traditional clinical trials can be inaccessible and ineffective

Commuting to trial sites is a burden on patients, including lost days from work and travel costs. During COVID-19, there were additional limitations as a result of lockdowns and restrictions. 70% of clinical trials suffered setbacks like slower patient recruitment and delayed clinical processes- thousands of patients affected.¹

Decentralised trials – or trials not restricted to one lab – significantly reduced the development time of drugs and vaccines by recording real-time data of patients and streamlining processes such as signing consent virtually. As a result, post-pandemic, decentralization of clinical trials is on the rise worldwide – 28% increase of decentralized clinical trials from 2021.²

18 of the top 20 pharma companies are Medidata’s customers. We are helping many of these companies move clinical trials out of the lab.
Recent milestone of 30,000 clinical trials, 9 million study participants, in partnership with 2,100 global customers and partners is a step in the same direction – we want to include more people in clinical trials to improve diversity in trials, which in turn improve the quality and efficiency of the study results.

Asia Pacific is a fertile ground for a diverse participant pool and lower costs

Asia-pacific has many advantages to offer for the clinical trials industry.

Countries like South Korea, China, Japan, and India are strategically important markets for many global pharma companies and therefore, patients from these countries are often included in global trials.

In addition, countries like Singapore are driving R&D – Health Sciences Authority (HSA) approved 146 clinical trials in 2021³; investments to the tune of US$25 billion to be in research and development including science and technology.⁴

Digitisation allows for remote access to trials for patients, increased connectivity for data sharing, improved accuracy in patient monitoring and data assessment.⁵ Solutions like Medidata Patient Cloud, Rave EDC and Medidata remote monitoring have transformed the clinical trials industry.
Merging technology, such as patient portals and wearable technology that support virtual trials and digital processes ensured studies could be continued outside the traditional lab settings. Penetration of wearable medical devices in Asia-Pacific expected to increase by 26.7% in 2027 – making Asia Pacific a fertile ground for trials.

Tapping into opportunities to drive growth in the region

Medidata leverages its learnings from 20-year history of driving innovation through a scalable cloud-based platform for studies conducted in over 56 countries.

Anticipating challenges for digitization adoption, it addresses the lack of end-to-end solutions, which is frequently a deterrent to clinical trial decentralization adoption. Scalable, adaptable solutions at all levels of decentralized and hybrid clinical trials encourage participation.

Medidata’s unified technology platform has assisted many life sciences companies in Asia Pacific in leveraging centralized data to address the holistic research process from start to finish. Medidata serves over 1.5 million platform users worldwide and is constantly working to standardize and improve their user experience.

Decentralized clinical trials start with the patient and how they are participating in the study and remotely engage with their trial activities. Building patient centric tools that empowers people encourages participation – which in turn ensures companies can virtually recruit from a wide and inclusive pool of participants and keep them engaged throughout the trial. Considering participants in clinical trials come from all walks of life – ease of usage for digital tools are important. Medidata’s single destination patient portal was built to provide greater flexibility to patients – solutions from electronic consent forms, intuitive model for capturing patient data and cloud enabled data storage has made patients’ participation in trials smoother.

Sources:

¹https://www.linkedin.com/posts/medidata-solutions_analysis-insight-action-the-latest-on-activity-6747246933057794048-25KO

² https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/analysis/2022-forecast-decentralised-trials-to-reach-new-heights-with-28-jump/

³https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/hsa-who-medicine-regulatory-system-recognition-2525471

⁴https://cnrssingapore.cnrs.fr/singapore-to-invest-s25-billion-in-next-5-year-plan-for-rd-including-new-programme-to-prepare-for-future-epidemics/

⁵https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343341350_Digitizing_clinical_trials

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