ACT Brief: Training Community Oncology Sites, Digital Tools for Patient-Centric Trials, and New Phase III Momentum in Obesity R&D

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

• A new pilot program from ACCC and ACRP suggests that targeted, oncology-specific training can meaningfully increase research readiness at community cancer centers, helping sites overcome staffing, recruitment, and operational barriers while expanding access to clinical trials for more diverse patient populations outside traditional academic settings.
• In the latest installment of our McKinsey interview series, Gaurav Agrawal explains how clinical operations teams can use real-world data, remote assessments, and digital health tools to reduce patient burden, simplify protocols, and extend trial participation into community-based care environments where most patients already receive treatment.
• And Eli Lilly announced positive Phase III results from the TRIUMPH-4 trial, showing its triple-agonist retatrutide delivered substantial weight loss alongside meaningful reductions in knee osteoarthritis pain, reinforcing growing momentum in obesity drug development and signaling increasingly complex, multi-endpoint trial designs ahead.

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