inVentiv Clinical Trial Recruitment Solutions (iCTRS), offering solutions to overcome the costly obstacles that delay clinical trials, has partnered with ViS Research, an online feasibility platform using interactive visualizations, to revolutionize and speed the antiquated system of clinical trial site evaluation.

Developing a drug can cost more than $1 billion, with a single clinical trial running more than $100 million. Proper planning is key to efficiently using R&D investment and avoiding delays in getting new medicines to market. Yet about 80% of clinical trials are delayed because of unfulfilled enrollment. iCTRS has pulled apart and analyzed each obstacle in clinical trial planning to improve the process.

The partnership with ViS addresses the key problem of clinical trial site evaluation—trial planners simply don’t have adequate analytics about research centers and locations where centers operate. Information is often inaccurate and outdated, or simply does not exist. To find the right trial site across more than 400,000 research centers worldwide, trial planners send out lengthy feasibility questionnaires, often on paper, that are frequently never filled out or returned. An estimated $10 billion a year is wasted because of poor site selection—the failure to match trial planners with appropriate, effective research sites.

iCTRS brings an interactive navigation system to this clinical research universe, so that trial planners can quickly match their needs with the disease-specific capabilities of individual research centers. They can quickly and efficiently evaluate all the relevant analytics—such as local patient population, research activity, infrastructure, personnel, timelines—from the country level through state, city, postal code, all the way down to what is inside the research center facilities.

“We are committed to accelerating clinical research through breakthrough innovation, and this partnership offers trial sponsors the fastest most sophisticated way of ensuring research sites are properly equipped, staffed and ready to be processed for rapid activation,” said Ramita Tandon, senior vice president and general manager for iCTRS.

ViS experts generate analytics relevant to the locations where centers operate, through algorithms and semantic technologies. The resulting analytics are validated by local experts and integrated with crowd-sourced input from clinical research centers through ViS’ social network, where centers upload their disease-specific profiles. ViS' collaborative analytics approach integrates large amounts of data to provide up-to-date analytics, while enabling research centers to securely and efficiently showcase their disease-specific capabilities to trial planners.

The companies will co-develop advanced, proprietary features for the platform that include automation of the Confidential Disclosure Agreement workflow and final sign-off, and enhanced analytical capabilities to rapidly compare feasibility information between sites.

“The entire feasibility process has needed revamping, and in partnering with iCTRS we expand our ability to deliver greater efficiency to the industry through innovative technologies in analysis, visualization and networking,” said Fabio Thiers, M.D., Ph.D., ViS founder and chief executive officer, a Harvard/MIT physician-scientist and pioneer in clinical research analytics. “We believe the use of these technologies could reduce waste in global clinical research by 10% to 15%.”

The ViS partnership is the latest in a series of innovative partnerships announced by iCTRS that include Medikly, PatientsLikeMe.com and Mytrus, in which inVentiv Health holds an equity stake—all designed to get much-needed medicines to market faster and more cost efficiently.