In 2022, Walgreens announced it was getting involved in clinical trials, assisting with recruitment and setting up several sites.
In its first three years, the US pharmacy chain has engaged 20 million patients, educating them about clinical trials and how they can participate in research. They are also assisting sponsors by using AI models to identify and contact patients who may be eligible for studies.
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The company has also set up several trial sites within pharmacies, providing low-level services such as blood draws to help bring sites closer to patients.
Walgreens is not the only company in the US that has tried to expand beyond standard pharmacy operations. For example, CVS had tried to assist with clinical trials but closed the facility down after two years.
Ramita Tandon, chief clinical trials officer at Walgreens, discussed with Clinical Trials Arena the company’s work over the past three years and its future research plans.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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By GlobalDataAbigail Beaney (AB): What have been some of Walgreen’s clinical trial achievements over the past three years?
Ramita Tandon (RT): We’ve done the outreach, we’ve engaged with 20 million patients and that includes educating, driving awareness and getting patients to participate. We have recruited a patient base where 44% identify themselves as racially or ethnically diverse. We’ve partnered with more than 20 life science companies and have touched across 11 disease areas.
We’ve also secured over 35 partnerships to bring clinical trials into communities who are oftentimes not invited or aware of clinical trials. That includes supporting AstraZeneca’s AIRE [Accelerating Innovations and Research Excellence] mobile units, clinical research mobile buses that provide education and awareness about clinical trials.
Finally, we have been leveraging advanced capabilities and tools like AI and developing predictive modelling technologies to help us identify patients and match them to trials, oftentimes exceeding recruitment timelines.
AB: You mentioned engaging with more than 20 million patients, but how many have enrolled in trials?
RT: This tends to depend on the trial setup. Oftentimes, many of our trial sponsors want us to be able to help them identify patients and refer them to site networks that are engaged in the trial activities. Sponsors sometimes want to leverage Walgreens’ infrastructure and recruit patients into trials through our site networks.
There’s certainly a breakdown of the types of patients and how they are forwarded into the actual trial itself. Patients through our referrals are 20% more likely to enrol in a study compared to other recruitment providers.
AB: How do you reach patients, and where do you get the data to know whether patients are potentially eligible for trials?
RT: Walgreens sits on what I call a treasure trove of insights. We have over 8,000 retail pharmacies, and nine million Americans visit a Walgreens every single day. 78% of the US population lives within five miles, with 50% of these patients from socially vulnerable areas.
We gain insights through real-time transactions of our consumers and patients who come into the stores to purchase. Store good purchases enable us to understand behaviours and purchasing patterns. We also have patients who come into our pharmacies to pick up their scripts [prescriptions], so we have a lot of quantitative and qualitative information on our patient populations. These insights enable us to really understand the patient’s healthcare journey and allow us to understand how best to engage those patients.
We take the collective power of these patient insights that reside within the Walgreens ecosystem and use tools that we have put in place to refine the patient population that would match a trial protocol.
We also have different engagement models for different patients because not all patient populations are going to consume information in the same way. For example, if you’re a patient community that resides in a rural part of the nation, versus the Deep South or urban areas, those engagement models are going to be very different. Depending on the patient demographics and what our insights show us, we can activate text messaging, email, phone calls, and even traditional mail to reach out to populations.
There are so many providers out there today that have aggregate data and can shape up patient cohorts, but our ability to use and apply those insights to the patient population, engage them in a way that they’re going to respond, and be able to reach out, because we have the trusted relationships, it allows us to accelerate recruitment timelines.
AB: Can you expand on the site network that Walgreens is working with?
RT: As part of our clinical research enterprise, we have been very intentionally focused on eliminating barriers around participation and accessibility. We have 20 community-based clinical research centres within our pharmacy locations. These are private health rooms that are fully compliant with the regulatory guidelines required in clinical research centres. This means that, beyond patients coming in to learn about research, we can deploy low-level clinical research services, which could be screening, diagnostics, or blood draws. We also work with pharmaceutical partners to help open additional locations depending on the trial needs, locations and the trial requirements.
We also have a model where we can work with other site networks depending on the trial and the sponsor-specific requirements. In those cases, our industry partners are looking for Walgreens to help identify patients and then refer them to those site networks.
AB: How do you anticipate the clinical trials area of Walgreens will develop over the next three years?
RT: Obviously, the evidence that we continue to generate and the proof points that we’re continuously able to generate around bringing diverse patient populations into the ecosystem. Currently, less than 5% of the US is participating in clinical research, and we want to move that needle into the double digits of patients participating in medical research. We want to continue to open more locations to crack the issue around accessibility and make alternative sites of care, like pharmacies, a valuable part of the ecosystem.
