This post was guest authored by Dave McKie, vice president, marketing | Medidata Solutions, a Dassault Systèmes company
By any measure, 2020 was a year to remember. For those of us in life sciences, 2020 was an opportunity to discover treatments for the COVID-19 pandemic. And the industry rose to the challenge, with one of the first vaccines designed within two days of receiving the genetic sequence. Testing and clinical trials moved forward at an astonishing pace, with the first regulatory approvals coming in December less than a year later. Medidata supported many of these mega trials (including Moderna), operating at a pace and scale unseen in our industry before.
The pandemic also resulted in significant site access issues, causing sponsors and CROs to more willingly adopt trial virtualization approaches. Medidata in turn picked up the gauntlet and increased our capabilities to support virtual trials. In early 2020 we launched myMedidata, a single destination patient portal to provide patients the capabilities to participate in clinical trials remotely. More than just helping patients participate remotely, myMedidata gives patients greater control in their participation. In addition to remote consent, eCOA, telehealth, and direct-to-patient drug shipment capabilities, myMedidata provides ongoing patient access to the data collected from them during the clinical trial. It also provides the foundation for our cross-sponsor patient registry capabilities.
We’re very proud of the work we’ve done to help our clients continue running clinical trials in the middle of the pandemic, including Catalyst Clinical Research. However, it wasn’t only patient visits and data collection impacted by site access issues. Monitors were unable to complete site visits and perform their traditional monitoring function. To help address this challenge, Medidata launched a new product called Remote Source Review in the span of three weeks. Already our sponsor and CRO customers are embracing this new approach to clinical trial monitoring (read our CTI press release).
While COVID-19 became a large part of last year’s focus, we continued to innovate in other areas of clinical research. Acorn AI’s Synthetic Control Arm, built on our database of more than 20,000+ clinical trials received two FDA approvals at both Celsion and Medicenna. We also announced a partnership with HealthVerity to increase our capabilities around combining real world and clinical trial data. And our Risk Based Quality Management capabilities continue to advance with a new product launch of Detect, our central monitoring offering, and Risk Management, directly integrated with Detect.
All of this is why we’re excited to welcome you to this year’s Road to NEXT 2021, sharing more of the details behind each of these stories as well as our new initiatives. We’re curating some of our best sessions from 2020, updating them, and adding new content to create six themed events—all designed to deliver new learnings and maximum flexibility. Held over a number of weeks, each event comprises four or more sessions of 30 mins each. Register once, and build your own agenda. Opt to join just one or all—the choice is yours with over 24 sessions to choose from.
Whether you’re interested in gaining a deeper understanding of Medidata’s unified platform, trial management, virtual trials and virtualizing solutions, AI data and advanced analytics, medical devices, and laboratory informatics, or focused on a more holistic overview of everything from clinical and research all the way through to manufacturing, Road to NEXT can help meet your needs. No matter your focus, there are plenty of opportunities to learn about cutting edge technologies and application of data analytics to help power your research efforts.