Data sharing between companies on a global scale is key in improving site selection and enrolment, experts agreed.
During a panel at CHI's 8th Annual SCOPE Europe: Summit for Clinical Ops Executives (SCOPE) Conference in Barcelona, four data experts explained the benefits that the Data Query System (DQS) has provided them across the full clinical trial process.
The DQS relies on sponsors and sites uploading data to allow the creation of a large, collated dataset that can help sponsors to see disease geography and site locations to help with trial planning.
Johnathan Crowther, head of the Operational Design Centre at MSD, said that enrolment modelling is one of the best tools the DQS provides.
“Using data like this, we can actually start to see country-level data, which then informs our budget. That way, when we get to the different governance steps, our budget can be more refined, and that enables us to make more targeted, valuable decisions,” Crowther said.
This is especially important for companies that lead M&As says Jane Twitchen, head clinical trial accelerator at Biogen. "Lots of companies are growing, not organically but by acquisition, so you never know what the next asset is. Sharing data with companies that have complementary footprints to us and work in different indications will allow us to grow and understand much more rapidly than we would if we were just building those data assets on our own,” she explained.
Data sharing would also help sponsors to locate good sites and principal investigators (PIs) for the disease area, says Sarah McClure, global data engagement lead at Sanofi. McClure said that if a PI has been a good site for Pfizer, Merck, or Lilly, information that can be obtained on the DQS, they also tend to be good for Sanofi. “It’s been great to be able to use that benchmark data to find the best countries and insights for our studies,” McClure said.
The DQS has also helped to produce golden IDs for patients, which can avoid duplication of patient profiles and assist sponsors in cleaning up their data, McClure continued. The golden ID is a unique identifier for persons and facilities that allows access to PI and facility-level enrolment metrics beyond those held by individual sponsors.
“Over the last year of adopting the golden ID, we have been cleaning our CTMS data, removing tens of thousands of duplicates that we had in all of our different systems. It's really helping streamline all of our data,” McClure said.
Twitchen agreed that the golden ID gives a company a reason to standardise data across different clinical trial management systems, which is valuable as companies grow and acquire new systems.
