What is a decentralized clinical trial? Why are clinical trials being decentralized? I think healthcare in general is moving in a direction where we are becoming patient-centric. And clinical research is one aspect of patient care. Clinical research nowadays, especially when it comes to multiple myeloma trials involving immunotherapies or CAR T's, are done at large academic centers where they have the resources, the nursing staff, the coordinator staff, and the physicians who are well versed in taking care of that disease. However, we realize that when we make it center-centric, so doctor-centric, we leave out the patients. And there is a trend in our community right now. How do we reach more patients? How do we reach patients who are generally, and how do we reduce the burden of healthcare or clinical research? So this concept of decentralized clinical trials is coming into play. So would that mean doing local blood work? Instead of someone lives an hour away from UT Southwestern and they're in a clinical And all I need them to do is a blood work, right? Do they have to come and travel to UT Southwestern an hour and get blood work and then leave? Or can that be accessible to them where they are? So decentralized meaning going to the patients and going out into communities and involving them into clinical research. So a decentralized clinical trial is a clinical trial where a lot of the interventions and a lot of the monitoring can be done outside of a hospital or a healthcare setting so people can have a wearable watch or perhaps a pulse heart rate monitor or even doing certain types of feedback virtually. Things like that can all be done outside of a healthcare setting. So they're very helpful in certain instances. Obviously, it's hard to do an interventional trial in that respect unless it's an oral agent. If you're doing an IV or an injectable, it's not going to lend itself to a decentralized But certainly after an agent is given, even in a healthcare setting, you can be monitoring those patients and monitoring vital signs, monitoring quality of life characteristics, things like that. Decentralized through virtual means and that can be very, very helpful for patients. It could also bring access to trials that may not be as easy for some patients who live far away, have transportation challenges, mobility issues, things like that. So these are things that are being actively incorporated in many trials. A pure decentralized trial of those is not going to lend itself to an interventional trial. It's going to be more for quality of life or an overall well-being type of trial.
HealthTree • July 19, 2024
