CRO/Sponsor

The CNPV program has compressed drug review timelines to as little as one to two months for qualifying sponsors, but succeeding under that pressure requires a fundamental rethink of how development teams plan, communicate, and execute.

Clinical Trials Day is an international celebration of everyone who makes medical discoveries possible. It is also an opportunity to shine a light on the innovations helping to keep research rising.

Clinical development productivity improved in 2025, but gains remain fragile as end-to-end timelines lengthened again, signaling that future success depends less on individual trial execution and more on program-level orchestration, site engagement, and adaptive operating models.

Managing financial integrity in a complex, milestone-driven operating model.

Participant adherence depends on readiness—a combination of knowledge, calibrated confidence, and real-world mastery—not simply on digital tools, reminders, or education, which are forms of exposure rather than preparation for sustained performance.

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary’s departure caps a turbulent tenure marked by leadership instability, industry pushback, and a series of regulatory controversies that complicated drug development for sponsors and CROs.

As imaging-heavy clinical trials grow more complex and globally distributed, sponsors are increasingly re-evaluating traditional infrastructure models, with cloud-native platforms showing potential to reduce operational burden, accelerate site activation, improve imaging quality oversight, and lower total trial costs.

From payment delays and feasibility misalignment to technology burden and AI adoption, clinical research sites are navigating a convergence of pressures that increasingly determine who sponsors work with and how well trials perform.

In this Q&A, Hal Green, senior solution architect and life sciences vertical lead EMEA at Loftware, examines how clinical supply chain fragmentation has shifted from an efficiency problem into a resilience problem—and what it takes to build infrastructure capable of absorbing disruption without losing trial continuity.

In this Q&A, Mwango Kashoki, MD, MPH, SVP and global head of regulatory strategy at Parexel, breaks down the FDA's plausible mechanism framework and what it means for sponsors developing individualized therapies in ultra-rare disease settings.

Behavioral science reveals how recruitment failures, site disengagement, and underrepresentation in clinical trials are rooted in early design decisions, and what sponsors can do to address them before they become costly problems.

The execution translation gap—the failure to convert identified problems into coordinated, timely action—costs millions per trial through delayed amendments, persistent deviations, and slow site activation, yet remains addressable through aligned accountability and proactive execution management.

In this video interview, Mwango Kashoki, MD, MPH, senior vice president and global head of regulatory strategy at Parexel, discusses how heterogeneity in disease course and patient characteristics creates confounding risk when using natural history data as an external control, and what sponsors need to do to achieve meaningful patient matching.

In this video interview, Mwango Kashoki, MD, MPH, senior vice president and global head of regulatory strategy at Parexel, examines the biological, dosing, and population-level considerations that sponsors must get right from the start when using basket and other master protocol designs to evaluate individualized therapies across multiple conditions.

A collaborative study by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development and CRIO identifies protocol interpretation and source document preparation as an understudied yet significant bottleneck in study start-up timelines that may hold key opportunities for efficiency gains.

In this video interview, Mwango Kashoki, MD, MPH, senior vice president and global head of regulatory strategy at Parexel, explains how the plausible mechanism framework reshapes the development timeline for individualized therapies by allowing first-in-human studies to serve as pivotal trials and giving sponsors earlier clarity on the evidence needed for approval.

In this video compilation, industry experts share their perspectives on the operational, technological, and methodological shifts defining clinical research in 2026.

Risk-based monitoring requires integrated data systems, validated analytics, and strong governance to work effectively across global trials, but sponsors face significant technical and operational challenges that demand strategic solutions and organizational alignment.

Real-world data is increasingly used to optimize trial design, reduce recruitment burden, and support regulatory decisions, but adoption remains uneven due to challenges around data quality, integration, and internal alignment across functional areas.

In this Q&A, Cheryl Kole, vice president of solution strategy and commercialization at Almac Clinical Technologies, examines what it takes to build and sustain a clinical trial technology infrastructure that can keep pace with increasingly complex study designs.

In this video interview, Cheryl Kole, vice president of solution strategy and commercialization at Almac Clinical Technologies, discusses why sponsors must integrate their digital and physical supply chains as a single operational flow and how to build the in-house capabilities and partner relationships needed to manage that complexity effectively.

Sample integrity and traceability often fail not because of science but because clinical trials rely on manual processes and fragmented systems that obscure problems until samples are already compromised.