DEI

In part 1 of this three-part series, behavioral science reveals how slow patient recruitment and enrollment challenges often stem from design and startup decisions made long before recruitment begins, but can be identified and resolved early when they still matter.

Analysis from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development suggests that transparency in clinical evidence, community engagement, and more representative clinical trials are key factors associated with faster vaccine adoption and improved public trust.

In this first part of a 2-part perspective, clinical trial recruitment failures are reframed as design outcomes, making the case for embedding enrollment feasibility into protocol governance from the start.

Closing the gender gap in data science and tech requires tackling barriers at every stage, from early education through career advancement, while actively challenging the unconscious biases that continue to hold women back.

Rising development costs, low success rates, and increasing trial complexity are reshaping the clinical trial project manager role, demanding stronger digital fluency, adaptive leadership, and expanded stakeholder coordination to deliver studies efficiently.

Industry leaders emphasized that accelerating clinical research must go hand in hand with sustained, community-driven strategies to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in clinical trials.

Amid mounting political and legal pressure, corporate DEI efforts, particularly in life sciences, are largely holding steady, with leadership, boards, and shareholders continuing to frame inclusion as a strategic driver of innovation, performance, and representative clinical research.

As Parkinson’s disease cases surge worldwide, growing evidence gaps around women’s biology, care access, and outcomes are driving new data-driven and digital strategies to advance sex-specific research and precision medicine.

Learn why combining AI-enabled trial matching with transportation, lodging, and financial assistance is essential to turning trial eligibility into actual participation—and why matching alone is not enough.

Persistent recruitment delays, high dropout rates, and missed timelines continue to slow global clinical trials, while data show that sub-Saharan Africa offers a largely untapped opportunity with established research capacity, large patient pools, and strong enrollment and retention performance.

This pilot project evaluated whether targeted training could strengthen clinical research capacity at community cancer centers, improve readiness to conduct oncology trials, and support more inclusive patient enrollment by addressing barriers, building foundational skills, and increasing staff confidence in trial implementation.

Exploring how large-scale patient databases and AI analytics can accelerate site activation, strengthen recruitment, and improve trial design from the start.

Addressing the imbalance in clinical trial workloads by empowering mid-level investigators and using AI to expand access to high-quality, diverse research leadership.

Examining how artificial intelligence can help identify true key opinion leaders in emerging markets to improve site influence, patient engagement, and trial success.

Examining how shifting leadership patterns in breast cancer research signal growing international participation—and the continued need for broader equity in global trials.

Although DEI remains a core tenet in pharma, strategies and goals have been reframed to align with the evolving political climate.

Capturing insights from clinical research professionals on the key trends and challenges shaping drug development today, from those in clinical trial operations and site relationships, to technology and AI, and the evolving regulatory and policy terrain.

Michel van Harten, MD, CEO, myTomorrows; and Kyle McAllister, co-founder, CEO, Trially, discuss how artificial intelligence can reduce barriers for underrepresented patients and streamline prescreening and outreach to support clinical research participation.

In this video interview, Adrianne Rivard, senior community development manager at myTomorrows, highlights how combining AI platforms with patient navigators can make trial-finding tools more equitable and accessible across diverse healthcare settings.

In this video interview, Sunny Kumar, MD, partner at Informed Ventures, explains how high upfront costs and limited proof of cost savings are slowing large-scale adoption of decentralized clinical trial models.

This explainer unpacks how recent US policy shifts are reshaping diversity, equity, and inclusion in clinical research, exploring the ripple effects on patients, sites, sponsors, and investigators.

The Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 to allow the Trump administration’s NIH funding cuts to continue, impacting more than 1,700 medical research grants in areas including heart disease, HIV/AIDS, Alzheimer’s disease, and mental health.

In this video interview, Caroline Potts, general manager of sites and patient services at Medical Research Network (MRN), explains why trial inclusivity requires shared responsibility across sponsors, CROs, sites, and advocacy groups.