ACT Brief: Patient Journey and Study Design, Decentralization's True Cost, and Europe's Pharma Competitiveness Crisis

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

• In part three of her DPHARM interview, Andrea Valente, CEO of uMotif, explains why truly understanding the patient journey from beginning to end—and building that understanding into both study design and data collection tools—remains one of the industry's most important unfinished tasks. Most trials still treat patient flow as a linear path when it is actually a series of decision points, obstacles, and moments where patients decide whether to continue participating.
• In a new FAQ, we examined whether decentralization is actually reducing site burden or just moving it, finding that operational switching costs, fragmented technology stacks, and gaps in the patient-site relationship raise questions the industry has been slow to confront directly. Enrollment performance gains are real, but sponsors haven't yet addressed what decentralization does to traditional site operations and relationships that still depend on in-person interaction.
• Nine chairs of Europe's largest drugmakers issued an open letter warning the continent risks losing the pharmaceutical investment race to the US and China, calling for faster clinical trials, stronger intellectual property protections, and increased health spending. Europe's share of global pharmaceutical R&D has fallen to 31% from 43% in 1990, about 40% of new therapies never reach European patients, and the continent spends only one percent of GDP on pharmaceuticals compared to two percent in the US.

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