Written by Brian Neman, Co-Founder & CEO, Sanguine for Biocom’s Biocommunique Newsletter
With more than 40,000 ongoing global clinical trials, COVID-19 will cause immense delays with the advancement of research. For non-invasive biospecimen studies and clinical trials that require test subjects to visit hospitals or clinics for biospecimen collection, will the patients just stop showing up for collection? What effects will COVID-19 have on the current studies and clinical trials? Are there ways we can continue to keep studies and trials moving forward, rather than risking potential deviations, jeopardizing data integrity and data quality, and most of all avoiding risking adverse events for the patients?
Currently, over 50% of studies and trials fail to meet their enrollment deadlines, and 90% fail entirely. Researchers face a series of restrictions in obtaining biospecimen samples, they range from a
combination of access to only one data source, one time point, and not having longitudinal data. These restrictions result in a high probability that researchers are not being able to select best possible test subjects for their trials. All of these hurdles existed before adding COVID-19 to complicate things further.