ACT Brief: Site-First Technology Strategy, AI Data Harmonization Architecture, and Obesity Trial Retention

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 post-SCOPE X interview, Liz Beatty explained why asking sites to use different technology for every sponsor remains a major barrier to AI adoption. A site-first approach to technology development prioritizes interoperability and user experience consistency across sponsors, enabling AI capabilities to function effectively at the point of data capture.
• In a new contributed article, the pharmaceutical industry is shifting from traditional data warehouses to hybrid "lakehouse" architectures that balance governance with flexibility for multi-modal data. Agentic orchestrators handling ETL, data quality, and harmonization are reducing time-to-insight by up to 75% while maintaining ALCOA+ compliance and regulatory readiness through automated lineage tracking and FAIR principles implementation.
• In a Signant Health analysis on obesity trials, discontinuation rates of 15-30% are driven primarily by gastrointestinal adverse events, perceived lack of efficacy, and logistical burden. Structured dietitian support, adaptive goal-setting, and predictive analytics identifying at-risk patients before withdrawal achieved 93.4% visit attendance and 82% retention rates in Phase III programs.

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