Advice for CROs and Sponsors Partnering With Retail Trial Sites

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Ramita Tandon, chief biopharma officer, Walgreens, discussed the company’s three-year milestone of leading clinical trials. Tandon highlighted several of Walgreens’ initiatives in the space, including how its 8,000+ pharmacy locations are bringing research directly into communities. She emphasized the need for community-based partnerships, cultural competence, and education to empower patients. Looking forward, strategic partnerships will be key in enhancing inclusivity and accessibility, with the ultimate goal of bridging gaps in clinical research and public health.

ACT: Walgreens has partnered with over two dozen life sciences companies. What advice would you offer clinical operations leaders on structuring productive, patient-centric collaborations with new types of trial partners like retail clinics or mobile units?

Tandon: We are trying to build the right highway and bringing trials closer to where the patients are, recognizing that the barriers exist and making sure that we're building an ecosystem to remove those barriers and make it easier for participation, and then also leveraging insights, whether, again, it's qualitative insights, quantitative insights, because you understand who the patient population is, and that will start to allow us to better engage patients and drive smarter, in recruitment, and redefine that patient experience.

From our perspective, what we're seeing, and I think what we're seeing in the industry, a shift towards community-based clinical research, and I think that represents a significant paradigm change in the overall clinical research ecosystem. I think historically, many potential participants have been hindered by geographic or logistical challenges, limiting the applicability of trial results, so for us, it is really around building that model that brings trials within the communities.

I think just hosting trials in retail settings. Where Walgreens pharmacies are located, our goal is to make sure we're reducing those barriers. We're facilitating more of those collisions, more of those interactions with patients, getting patients comfortable. It's really around educating and making patients aware that clinical trials is a key part of one's care journey. Those conversations are not happening at all the provider settings. We're doing our part from a pharmacy perspective, and we're hoping those conversations are happening more consistently across all provider ecosystems, and that's really to ensure that the outcomes of these trials when they are finished, are applicable to a broader segment of the population, and then ultimately, when a drug does get approved, it improves the utility and the impact of medical research. For us, the integration of retail pharmacies into clinical research really affords a very unique opportunity to bridge the gap between research and then real-world data collection. For example, pharmacy-based clinical trials brings research opportunities directly into communities, expanding access to capturing real-world data, things that are happening in real time. As a result, pharmacy-based community trials, we have the ability to reach participants who may never have considered enrolling in traditional clinical trial settings, and just broadening that scope and inclusivity in clinical research.