Amgen has teamed up with cloud-based trial solutions firm Reify Health to help boost patients into its drug studies.
The expanded pact, financial details of which were kept under wraps, will see Amgen initially deploy Reify Health’s so-called StudyTeam software to trials “across multiple indications.” This platform is designed as an upgrade to the systems healthcare staff at clinical research sites depend on to run trials.
The idea is to digitize much of the often manual work involved in trials to accelerate tasks and enrollment, which the company says it can speed up, “on average, by 6 weeks per trial,” according to Reify.
Amgen said in a statement that it “wanted to reduce the amount of manual work sites manage during recruitment and to automate information sharing between sites and Amgen’s clinical trial teams.”
Using Reify Health, it will now boost that, making StudyTeam available to clinical research sites to centrally manage and track an array of recruitment and enrollment activities and information such as prescreening activity, recruitment progress and the impact of I/E criteria.
Amgen can then access those data to view site-by-site prescreening status and activity, monitor the success of various recruitment strategies and take earlier action such as making protocol amendments, deploying backup sites or reallocating recruitment budget.
“The success of any study relies on the ability to recruit the right patients in the most efficient way possible,” said Dylan Rosser, executive director of global development operations at Amgen.
“Investigational sites have an incredible workload to manage. Not only are they recruiting into clinical trials, but they are treating their entire patient population with a fixed resource. StudyTeam positions itself in the sites’ workflow allowing them to visualize their patient population and their patients’ suitability for any given protocol. For sponsors, it gives us visibility into activity at a site enabling us to support and collaborate with sites to deliver tailored enrollment tools for these trials.”
This comes just three months after Reify got off a $30 million funding round, and after it teamed up with Eli Lilly.
“We built StudyTeam because we recognized an imbalance in how clinical trials were being run. Sites and sponsors were operating in different environments during the critical recruitment and enrollment phases of trials. They were unable to share information effectively,” added Ralph Passarella, CEO and co-founder of Reify Health.
“We have been thrilled to work with companies like Amgen who see the value of working differently—they are committed to finding ways to optimize trial operations that also reduce site burden. Their approach will drive real transformation in the world of clinical development, and we’re honored to be a part of it.”