Sustainability in Clinical Trials: The Pistoia Alliance’s Initiative to Assess Carbon Footprint

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Theirry Escudier, Portfolio Lead, Pistoia Alliance, discussed the alliance’s newest initiative to assess the carbon footprint of clinical trials. The initiative aims to answer whether decentralized clinical trials positively or negatively impact carbon footprints. Escudier also discussed how clinical research stakeholders are slowly beginning to adopt more sustainability practices, focusing on reducing waste and costs.

ACT: Could you tell our audience a bit about the Pistoia Alliance’s newest initiative to assess the sustainability of different clinical trial models?

Escudier: In fact, to be very clear, we have started with this already three years ago, to dig into the issue of how can we assess the carbon footprint of clinical trials? Our aim with this three years ago was to try to assess the impact of DCT (decentralized clinical trials), but it was so tough to be able to evaluate or propose a standard framework to be able to do that that in fact, with the partner company we have been working with called Sustainable Healthcare Coalition (SHC), we have decided, in fact, along the journey in the last three years, first to focus, can we build a proper tool and framework to assess the carbon footprint of any type of trial? Let's start to do that. To do that, we had to collect data from both company members, the one from the Pistoia Alliance and the one from the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition. We have been collecting, let's say, operational data from in a way, protocol start until clinical summary report finalization, and we have identified what we call an activity based model, that is to say, looking at the clinical trial flow chart and looking for preparation, implementation, regulatory, IRB, monitoring, data collection, and among those bricks we have went to lower bricks, and we have been able to ask our members, we want to collect your operational data, such as monitoring visits, your monitors are going to visit one site, by car, by train, by foot, or whatever, for the patient, the same type of story for the investigator also at the site, we have tried to collect those data, not easy, because most of the people have never done that before, but so at least, we have been able to put in place the standard framework that is now available. In the next step of the journey, we are going really to come back to the early days of our question: do DCTs have a good or bad impact on the carbon footprint of clinical trials? We will be able to answer, hopefully in one year time, when we will have collected a lot of data, hopefully from our members.