While clinical trials have historically played a more behind-the-scenes role in healthcare, they’re starting to come center stage as the federal government and companies like Walgreens pour millions into making trials more diverse and efficient.
Anthony Costello has spent his entire career working in the clinical trials space, starting in data management at Genentech and now working as CEO of Medidata, a company that develops technology created to address some of the industry’s most pressing challenges.
“We sit at the center of and make a big difference in so many products that are going to so many different disease areas,” Costello told Healthcare Brew. “At Medidata, our focus tends to be those cases where there’s an unmet medical need, and we specialize in places where…there is no solve for the medical problem.”
Costello sat down with Healthcare Brew to give insight into the work Medidata is doing to improve clinical trials.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What is Medidata’s overall mission?
One of our biggest aspirations has been to extend the way that we as an industry engage with patients. Patients are often recruited for a trial and then dropped at the end—they don’t know what happened, they don’t have any follow-up with the drug, they don’t even know if their research was successful.
We’re really trying to focus on changing that engagement profile with patients, making it more of a lifelong engagement.
We’re also focused on the pharma companies that are running the trials and the CROs [contract research organizations] that are managing those trials. We’ve created a bunch of technology interspersed with lots of artificial intelligence capabilities in order to help those people who are at the center of running the trials be more effective in their jobs.
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What would you say are the biggest challenges facing the clinical trials industry?
The biggest one is cost and complexity. Pipelines of very interesting drugs are just dying under the weight of their own cost and complexity, and the result is bad news for all of us. These pipelines are quite simply not being explored to the extent that they could be and should be.
Medidata’s focus is trying to decentralize trials, trying to reduce burden, trying to make trials more cost effective, trying to hit higher diversity profiles throughout the industry.
These are lofty goals; these are all decades-old challenges for our industry, but solving them collectively will bring down the cost and complexity of running these studies.
You attended the White House Clinical Trials forum earlier this year. Based on those discussions, where do you see the future of clinical trials headed?
The heads of government agencies and a bunch of very large academic institutions throughout the country that execute very large Phase 3 critical trials attended, and they’re all talking about the same problems: How do we bring down cost? How do we leverage AI [artificial intelligence] in a way that’s appropriate? How do we pull data from a patient’s life?
As an industry, we really come in and leverage this tiny little fraction of the available data for the 12- or 18-month period that a patient is on a trial. Everyone at the White House Forum—and definitely everyone at Medidata—is focused on really changing that paradigm, such that we, as a clinical research industry, are leveraging much more of that patient’s lifelong data to learn much more rapidly whether a drug is going to work for them, and then using that same data to build better AI models.