ACT Brief: Purpose Meets Operational Focus, Acceleration Shifts Upstream, and AI Delivers Near-Term Impact

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

• At the opening keynote fireside chat of this year’s SCOPE Summit, Eliav Barr of Merck and Ken Getz of Tufts CSDD emphasized the growing need for therapeutic-area specialization and data minimization in clinical development. Barr said protocol success increasingly depends on deep disease-area expertise, while collecting only critical data can reduce patient burden and downstream operational complexity. The discussion also addressed declining public trust in science and the importance of meeting patients where they are through more practical, patient-centered trial design.
• During the SCOPE opening keynote panel on radical acceleration in clinical research, industry leaders agreed that the greatest opportunity to compress timelines lies earlier in trial planning rather than later execution phases. Panelists highlighted protocol optimization, site selection, and enrollment readiness as high-leverage decision points, while noting that privacy-preserving access to near–real-time healthcare data could significantly improve feasibility forecasting. Speakers stressed that AI can enable faster decisions, but must be balanced with human interaction at sites and with patients.
• And finally, in a SCOPE video interview with ACT, IQVIA’s Raja Shankar said AI is already having measurable impact through clinical trial simulation and automation across the development lifecycle. He explained that AI-driven modeling can strengthen protocol design before trials begin, while automation supports faster site activation, risk-based monitoring, and trial closeout. Shankar noted that emerging applications such as synthetic control arms and digital twins could further reshape trial design in the years ahead.

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