In today’s ACT Brief, we examine how AI is moving into continuous clinical operating models, how trust is built into oncology real-world evidence, and how the FDA approved a self-administered option for thyroid eye disease.
News|Podcasts|October 22, 2026
ACT Brief: Applied Clinical Trials at 2026 SCRS Global Site Solutions Summit
Author(s)Andy Studna, Senior Editor
In today’s ACT Brief, we examine how sites can avoid both fear-driven and overly aggressive AI adoption, why community-based research needs sustained financial investment, and why patient access matters more than organizational size.
This is the Applied Clinical Trials Brief—your fast track to the latest insights shaping clinical operations and drug development.
- In an
SCRS Global Site Solutions Summit interview , Mike Wenger, chief innovation officer at CRIO, identifies two opposite AI adoption failures. Sites that avoid AI out of fear misread sponsor expectations, which center on honoring contracts and confidentiality rather than banning the technology. Overcorrecting into aggressive adoption carries its own risk, so Wenger recommends scoping AI to small, well-suited pieces of a workflow and keeping repeatable processes in traditional software. - In
another SCRS summit interview , Jennifer Byrne, CEO and founder of Javara, argues that the central gap is financial rather than operational. She says reliable research infrastructure requires sustained investment rather than study-by-study funding, and points to government funding and public-private partnerships as possible routes. Byrne also warns that building research programs piecemeal ignores the real costs of developing the next generation of investigators. - In a
third SCRS summit interview , Kurt Mussina, CEO of Paradigm Clinical Research, argues that scale should drive operational efficiency but should not mean handing an entire study to a single site. Coordinating ten organizations is far heavier than managing two, yet sponsors remain risk-averse about concentrating studies in one organization. For Mussina, the real measure is whether an organization can access, enroll, and retain patients, not its size or number of locations.
That’s all for today’s ACT Brief. Join us tomorrow for more updates shaping clinical operations and drug development. Thanks for listening.
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