Fostering a Unified Team Culture in Sponsor and CRO Partnerships

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: How can sponsors and CROs establish a "one team" mindset to drive clinical trial success?

Ng-Cashin: I've been on both sides of the fence on that. I can speak to an example where I was at a biotech and I had multiple vendors and a very small internal team. Like I said, I think the leader of that team sets the tone right. We're not “things go wrong.” We're not going to be pointing fingers at, “It was this company's fault or that company's fault.” There's going to be collaboration in the good times and the bad times. I think setting that tone early on from top to bottom, as I mentioned. I also think there are ways to incentivize that behavior, whether it's team building up front, we're all in a cost constrained environment at the moment, but if you could make an investment in bringing the team together, we're doing all this virtually all the time, but if we could bring some people face to face, get some emotion, get some personality behind those relationships, I think that helps. I think there are incentives that you can make common. If the team achieves, set your metric, first patient in or 50% enrolled, whatever the leadership decides, together, there's some kind of shared reward. I think these are some things you can do to keep it positive, keep it collaborative.