Advertise on podcast: DIA: Driving Insights to Action

A few years ago, 8-year-old Autumn noticed a lump on the side of her neck as she was preparing for bed one night. That quiet night opened a new chapter not only in Autumn’s life but in the life of her entire family: Autumn had leukemia. In this interview, Autumn shares the story of her treatment and recovery as a girl who had not yet turned 11. Her experience was also captured in a documentary. When asked to share her advice to healthcare professionals and researchers as a pediatric oncology patient, Autumn explained: “Every patient is a different case, has a different body, and knows about their body. No matter how amazing you are at the job, keep in mind what children have to say instead of what you already know.”

In April 2023, Professor John Skerritt retired after 11 years of exemplary public service as deputy secretary of the Health Products Regulation Group and head of the Therapeutic Goods Administration in Australia. “What's really changed and what will persist after COVID? First, I think regulators have become a bit more comfortable in dealing with uncertainty. Uncertainty is the biggest challenge rather than benefit-risk,” he explains. “International regulatory collaboration became the basis of working together on these new products: We exchanged information on policies, on how the clinical data was developing, on the real-world performance of these drugs and vaccines, and on safety and post-approval requirements. These are going to persist.”

In part two of this podcast, “ePatients” Dave deBronkart and Stacy Hurt (Patient Advocacy Ambassador, Parexel) discuss new opportunities in the future of patient engagement in clinical research and care with DIA GAM 2023 Patient Engagement track chair Pujita Vaidya. “This advent and acceleration of artificial intelligence (which should be augmented intelligence) and digital biomarkers should not replace the physician-patient relationship but enhance it,” Stacy explains. “Lastly: If you want sustainable patient insights, don't only ask a patient, but invest in and hire patients as internal subject matter experts and full-time employees of your organization.” Listen to part 1.

DIA GAM 2023 Patient Engagement track chair Pujita Vaidya discusses the definition, history, and current state of patient engagement in clinical research and care with cancer survivors and “ePatients” Dave deBronkart and Stacy Hurt (Patient Advocacy Ambassador, Parexel). “Many people were trained for generations to think of patients as poor people who just don't understand how to save their own lives. I'm here to tell you, we are not only eager to help but we're tired of being treated as crash test dummies,” Dave says. “Engagement doesn't just mean invite me into your process. It also means listen to me as a thinking, intelligent person who might have some ideas that you haven't thought of.”

“Healthcare systems obviously have as their primary role the delivery of healthcare,” says Steve Webb, Australian Clinical Trials Alliance board chair. “But we can see big improvements in health outcomes, combined with substantially better financial performance of the healthcare system, if the healthcare system has the dual role of treating patients as well as generating evidence about the most effective treatment options to guide that care.”

For regulators in Brazil, the pandemic’s aftermath includes a backlog of post-approval changes, delayed by emergency development of COVID-19 vaccines and therapies, related to biologic product quality. ANVISA’s new Online Optimized Assessment Project has significantly resolved these pending requests. “The pandemic had already enabled use of online tools for remote assessment of applications and virtual meetings between ANVISA and applicants, and also helped us be closer to other reference regulatory authorities in the process of building trust,” explains project architect Elkiane Macedo Rama, an Adviser of ANVISA’s Third Directorate. “The Online Optimized Assessment Project was a way to gather all these tools in a strategy to speed up the review process of these applications.”

“The pandemic had a substantial impact on community understanding of clinical trials. Having said that, the sort of ambient level of community knowledge of clinical trials is still substantially lower than it needs to be,” explains Australian Clinical Trials Alliance Board Chair Steve Webb. “Community awareness of the difference between evaluation of experimental interventions, about which relatively little is known regarding safety and effectiveness, compared with comparative effectiveness research, is an important distinction often with limited understanding in the community, in government, and amongst policymakers.”

From microphysiological systems and digital pathology to next-generation-sequencing and diversity in foundational genomic data sets: In this iteration of our annual year in review podcast, Global Forum Co-Editors for Translational Science Gary Kelloff and Lanny Kirsch discuss emergent technologies and approaches that are upending clinical development, diagnostic, and patient care in oncology and beyond.

While the African Medicines Agency (AMA) plans and plants its inaugural headquarters in Rwanda, the European Commission, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), several EU Member States, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation continue to mobilize more than €100 million in support. “The idea is to use the AMA as a platform that will further advance the capacities of the African continent to regulate medical products as a collective. It's a network approach to regulation of medical products on the continent,” explains David Mukanga (Deputy Director, Africa Regulatory Systems, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) in this conversation with EMA Head of International Affairs Martin Harvey Allchurch.

Clinical trials struggle to enroll eligible patients, while interested patients have difficulty finding pertinent clinical trials. Can technology help solve this people problem? “Typical patient recruitment happens based on historical data at research sites and that usually does not help, given the number of competing clinical trials trying to reach out to the same patients,” explains Indegene Senior Vice President for Enterprise Clinical Solutions Ram Yeleswarapu. “But today, tools and techniques to mine electronic health record data, clinical data, molecular data, allow us to look at sites and patients in a much more precise manner.”

Actions to increase patient diversity in clinical research initially addressed racial and ethnic demographics but are expanding to address gender identity. “Further research can only help us better understand the differences in our bodies and illnesses and how combinations of certain medications and existing treatments can improve everyone's lives,” explains Liam Paschall (Parexel, TransCanWork, DEIBA thought leader). “This will not only help transgender people. It's going to teach us about how the human body works.” 

Digital technologies are rippling through clinical research and care, promising deeper links between healthcare research and delivery. In her interview with Global Forum US Editor Ebony Dashiell-Aje (BioMarin), Digital Medicine Society CEO Jennifer Goldsack expresses concern about the lag between producing evidence that something is fit for purpose and the conversations that need to take pace with payers and HTA experts. “We don't want to demonstrate, using the best, most novel measures possible, that new therapies are making a meaningful change for patients in ways that we haven't been able to measure before but are critically important, then delay going to market because additional evidence is required by our payer colleagues because we haven't taken time to take them with us.”