Walgreens’ Clinical Trials Journey: Three Years In

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Ramita Tandon, chief biopharma officer, Walgreens, discussed the company’s three-year milestone of leading clinical trials. Tandon highlighted several of Walgreens’ initiatives in the space, including how its 8,000+ pharmacy locations are bringing research directly into communities. She emphasized the need for community-based partnerships, cultural competence, and education to empower patients. Looking forward, strategic partnerships will be key in enhancing inclusivity and accessibility, with the ultimate goal of bridging gaps in clinical research and public health.

ACT: Three years in, how would you characterize Walgreens’ clinical trials journey? What operational gaps in traditional research models were you initially aiming to solve?

Tandon: If I can just step back, first of all, Andy, thank you for connecting today and talk about our Walgreens clinical trials enterprise. As you mentioned, June marks a three-year anniversary since Walgreens launched its enterprise, and in the short time, we've become just a powerful force and just reshaping how clinical trials is conducted. How we reach out to patients, and really are redefining the importance of looking at ways to leverage community settings of care and bringing clinical research into these communities, led by leveraging the pharmacy assets. Just to stake the claim here, Walgreens Clinical Trials now is the longest commitment to clinical research from a US, retail pharmacy perspective. We're super excited and super proud, from that perspective. I think, despite all the recent healthcare advances, we certainly see a big part of the headlines of trials continuing to fail to meet their enrollment goals in the stated timeframes. We know that less than 3-5% of the US population participates in clinical research, and that discrepancy really suggests to all of us as an industry, that's a deeply rooted issue that. We at all Walgreens decided to take an aim to really solve these issues and use the pharmacy-led assets to really be bold and take action, and so we set out to solve this by looking at ways to redefine that patient experience in research. From the very outset of the launch of our enterprise, our focus has really been rooted in, how do we bring clinical research to more people across this nation? We believe we're well on our way to that goal. In fact, we've reached out to more than 17 million patients to potentially recruit them for our trials. We've engaged in more than a million patients per month in 2024 alone, and if I step back and think about the how, we've really built a model that allows for flexibility in how patients can participate, because, again, our focus is, how do we make it more convenient and less burdensome for patients, so that more of our patient populations across the nation can participate. What that flexible model entails, it includes leveraging our physical footprint, so we have well over 8000 locations across the nation. We're leveraging a lot of our store footprint to become clinical trial centers, we're able to offer virtual follow ups, so where there's actual ability within the clinical trial protocols, we can then digitize aspects of that workflow so patients can be able to be at their own homes and be able to engage the healthcare professional and provider, and even offer the ability to bring clinical research at patient homes, so that means there are some aspects of the patient visit, whether it's blood draws, deploying some of our nurses, at patients homes to be able to carry forward with some of these visits.

Recently, we launched our patient advisory board that is made up of patient experts, and that's really enabling us at Walgreens to understand, how do we make trials and trial designs more patient-centric? What's the best way to engage the patient population? It's not a one size fits all, particularly as we look at patient populations outside of the urban areas and we think about some of the rural areas or patient populations in the deep south, this advisory board has been very instrumental to give us their insights, their lived experiences, and help us shape how we navigate and ensuring we're improving those recruitment and retention efforts that we've got underway.