What experts think will happen with patient centricity in 2024

Clinical Leader asked experts across the continuum to discuss patient centricity themes, including diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and precision medicine, in the clinical trials industry as we move into 2024.

Charlie said: “Diversity and inclusion initiatives will continue to grow in importance, as trials need to better reflect real-world populations. More efforts will be made to recruit and retain diverse participants, to improve trust in trials and also accessibility by building beyond translation, and to provide much more culturally tuned resources.

Patient-centric trial design, too, will remain in focus as organizations drive to offer more flexible, convenient, and accessible trials to reach more diverse populations. As options expand for trial participation, with hybrid, virtual, and decentralized study models growing in popularity, sponsors, sites, and CROs will compete to be study providers of choice.

Finally, personalized therapies tailored to the individual characteristics of each patient, such as their genetic profile, biomarkers, or disease subtype, have the potential to improve the efficacy and safety of therapies, as well as reduce the cost and waste of ineffective treatments. However, they also pose challenges for the design and conduct of clinical trials, which traditionally rely on large and homogeneous patient populations to demonstrate statistical significance and generalizability. Demonstrating the effectiveness and safety of personalized therapies will require innovative trial designs and much more granular stratification of populations as well as the use of new data types and sources to understand potential impact.”