This October will see experts meet in the biotech hub of Boston to assess the scale and solutions for the leading challenges facing clinical trials today, notably the struggle to gain and maintain study participants.
The 18th Annual Outsourcing in Clinical Trials New England conference is being held 27–28 October 2026, where a cross-section of the biopharma industry will discuss the latest developments and challenges to conducting clinical trials.
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This year’s keynote topic concerns the growing global enrolment challenge, which will be addressed in an opening Q&A with Kenneth Getz, executive director at the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. With an explosion of therapeutic innovation in areas like cancer research has come swelling demands to enrol patients into clinical trials. Many trials are terminated early due to too few patients being recruited.
Getz will kick off the conference by presenting the evidence quantifying the current scale of this issue globally and discussing how trial sponsors can adapt trial design in response. He will then lead a keynote panel on broader strategies being implemented today to drive more agile and bespoke trial designs.
Throughout the two days in Boston, sessions will be split into three streams. These will cover: outsourcing and clinical operations; data, artificial intelligence (AI), and clinical innovation; and biotech strategy. Talks are planned to cover regulatory developments in the clinical space, the rise in patient-centricity, and the impact of geopolitical movements given by representatives from leading pharmaceutical companies and vendors.
Aditya Kotta, vice president of business development at Novotech, is scheduled to give a talk on the latest clinical developments across the US and Chinese markets. Akash Patel, senior director at GSK, and Vasudev Bhupathi, director of pharmacovigilance at Moderna, will be holding an ‘ask the experts’ session touching on the new International Council for Harmonisation (ICH) E6(R3) guidelines.
As has been the case in recent years, AI will be a major topic of discussion. Kelly Butler, ethics and compliance partner at Takeda Pharmaceutical, will lead an interactive session on how misrepresentation, bias, and the limits of data impact the conclusions that can be drawn from the use of AI in the clinical space. A panel discussion including representatives from Tufts, Novo, and Alnylam Therapeutics will also be looking at how sponsor operating models are evolving to accommodate AI alongside more risk-based, centralised approaches to study monitoring.
The second day will cover similar themes in the clinical trials space with sessions looking at AI-enabled study monitoring, strategies to pick the right CRO, and more. The conference closes with a keynote presentation from Kevin Bugin, head of global regulatory policy and intelligence at Amgen. Bugin, a former deputy director of operations at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), will outline how FDA priorities are shaping the evolution of clinical progress towards greater speed, breadth, and patient inclusivity.
A detailed agenda for the 18th Annual Outsourcing in Clinical Trials New England 2026 conference can be accessed here. The conference is hosted by Arena International Events Group, a B2B events company owned by GlobalData, the parent company of Clinical Trials Arena and Pharmaceutical Technology.
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