Bridging Communication Gaps to Strengthen CRO-Sponsor Collaboration

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Judith Ng-Cashin, MD, chief medical officer, Novotech discussed the company’s recent accomplishment of winning the Citeline CRO Partnership of the Year Award in recognition of its partnership with Tune Therapeutics. Ng-Cashin highlighted the importance of seamless, trusting relationships in clinical research, as well as the roles of cost efficiency, risk-based approaches, and leveraging CRO expertise to navigate partnerships in the evolving regulatory landscape.

ACT: In your view, what challenges do stakeholders most commonly encounter when trying to form strong partnerships, whether it’s with sponsors, pharma, etc.? How can these be solved?

Ng-Cashin: I think, especially in our current funding, our current regulatory environment, there's a lot of pressure to deliver data, to deliver a successful program. During those tight times, I think that's when some of these things that we just talked about, in terms of collaborative partnerships, being proactive, set the setting those things up a priori. That's when these things break down. My observation is a lot of times at the top, at the executive level, there's an agreement, there's collaboration, there's a holding of hands and a singing of kumbaya about how we're going to work together and be one team. What's the cliche? It doesn't matter what it says on your badge. We're all one team. I think, how that gets communicated, and how the team that are actually operationalizing the project on both sides, how that trickles down and gets interpreted and gets lived within the conduct of a study, that, to me, is a communication thing and a leadership thing. It behooves those of us who are at the executive level to make sure we're modeling the right behavior, to make sure we're putting in the right metrics and expectations about behavior, because a lot of this stuff is soft skill, right? It's like how you show up. Are you assuming positive intent from your counterparts in the other company? I can't emphasize enough, you can write all this stuff down in a playbook and in a process, but if you get on a video call and the expressions are like this. It's not going to work, right? That's not how the words are lived and I think that matters, and I think just spending some time on that in the kickoff and really showing that you have executive support to make this partnership work, I think goes a long way.