For the estimated 30 million people worldwide who have Alzheimer’s disease, progress toward understanding and treating this most prevalent form of dementia is frustratingly slow. The few approved drugs address only the condition’s symptoms, though scores of drugs to prevent onset or alter the disease’s course are now under study. From high screen failure rates...
Premier Research is proud to be a presenting sponsor of “Disorder: A Rare Disease Film Festival,” being held in Boston in October. Festival co-founder Daniel DeFabio shares with us why having such an event is important for raising awareness, sparking conversations and hopefully, maybe even a cure or two. A couple years ago, I made...
A trial’s success depends largely on the ability to recruit and retain an adequate number of participants. Recruitment can be especially difficult in opioid clinical trials, due to a variety of factors. Here are seven things you should know about the challenges associated with recruiting patients for opioid trials: 1. Certain necessary aspects of trial...
DURHAM, N.C., JULY 21, 2017 — Premier Research, seeking to accelerate clinical trial design and patient recruitment to better serve its highly innovative customers, has signed an agreement with TriNetX to allow direct query access to its global health research network, comprised of healthcare organizations representing over 84 million patients globally. The Durham-based contract research organization will use TriNetX’s cloud-based platform...
Patient and parent engagement is crucial for successful pediatric drug trials. That’s why the best strategies are ones that encourage proactive involvement beginning at the early stages of protocol development through study conduct and eventual results-sharing. And that includes input. We partnered with iCAN in 2015 to ask pediatric patients, their family members, and even their friends...
At first glance, it seemed no more complex than any other global, randomized Phase 3 study. The devil turned up in the details. First challenge: overcome early patient screening failure rate of 70 percent At first, screening failure rates were discouraging at best – between 60 and 70 percent. We responded quickly, by expanding the...
Patients in fibromyalgia clinical trials are an interesting bunch. On one hand, you’ll seldom find a more accommodating and cooperative group of people. For years the condition was so poorly understood that many patients were treated dismissively by physicians who didn’t recognize fibromyalgia as a genuine affliction. And even today, the disease’s many symptoms continue...
Both understanding the role of patient advocacy groups in building better clinical trials and improving the research process mean first taking a look at the history of orphan drug development in the United States and Europe. An “orphan drug” is a drug that treats a condition that fewer than 200,000 people have. Because rare diseases...
Wearable medical devices are yielding increasingly important insights into health. Rosalind Picard, Sc.D., professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, discussed the applications of one such device, wearable wrist sensors that measure electrical changes in the skin, in an informative plenary lecture we attended at the American Pain Society’s 36th annual meeting in Pittsburgh,...
A little less than five percent of the world’s population are estimated to suffer from more than 7,000 different types of known rare diseases. There are even more medical conditions where those who have them are too embarrassed to talk about what’s wrong or simply don’t know exactly what ails them. Yet, these individuals are...