ACT Brief: DIA Leadership Amid Uncertainty, Reimagining CRO Contracts, and Eli Lilly Expansion

This is the Applied Clinical Trials Brief—your fast track to the latest insights shaping clinical operations and drug development.

• At the 2026 DIA Global Annual Meeting, Marwan Fathallah, president and CEO of DIA Global, discussed ecosystem-wide leadership amid regulatory uncertainty and highlighted breakthroughs in obesity, healthcare AI, and cell and gene therapy shaping the field in 2026.
• In a new contributed article, authors examined how traditional CRO contracting models create financial misalignment and proposed the CURED Shared Performance Contracting model, which aligns effort to deliverables through transparent cost tracking, progress monitoring, and risk sharing to improve revenue recognition and margin stability.
• Eli Lilly entered a strategic research collaboration with Abbisko Therapeutics for early-stage drug discovery across multiple targets. The deal follows Lilly's acquisitions this year of Contessa Pharmaceuticals for sleep disorders and Ajax Therapeutics for a selective JAK2 inhibitor.

That's all for today's ACT Brief. Join us tomorrow for more updates shaping clinical operations and drug development. Thanks for listening.