Ronald W. Helms, global CRO Rho’s chairman and co-founder, has been inducted as a Fellow of the Society for Clinical Trials. The Society established the title of Fellow of the Society for Clinical Trials (FSCT) in 2005 to honor society members who have made significant contributions to the advancement of clinical trials and to the society.

“Randomized, controlled clinical trials are the ‘gold standard’ for demonstrating that a new drug or medical procedure is safe and efficacious,” said Helms, who also is professor emeritus at UNC’s department of biostatistics. “Every prescription drug any of us takes and virtually all the currently performed surgical and other medical procedures had to be tested and proven by at least two RCCTs. Since the 1970s members of the Society for Clinical Trials—including a number of Rho’s scientists and UNC Biostatistics faculty—have invented, tested and adopted new RCCT designs and procedures that substantially shorten the time it takes to gain approval for new drugs and medical procedures.”

The Society cited Helms’ roles as organizer, designer, primary biostatistician or leader of approximately 200 clinical trials, conducted mostly in the U.S. but spanning all the populated continents. He also was cited for early research in electronic data capture, in which clinical trials data are recorded directly to computers, bypassing paper forms and “metadata-driven clinical trial data management systems.” 

He currently is overall Principal Investigator of Rho’s coordinating center for nine multinational research consortia that are conducting 92 clinical trials in asthma and allergic diseases, autoimmune diseases and transplantation, funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Helms also continues to develop methods to make clinical trials faster, less expensive and produce higher quality results.