ZS Launches Clinical Design Center To Help Cross-Functional Pharma Teams Accelerate Clinical Programs

Global professional services firm ZS has launched Clinical Design Center, an integrated technology platform and services solution that allows cross-functional teams within pharmaceutical organizations to collaborate in a virtual environment to make better data-driven decisions on clinical trial design and operations. It allows teams to gain more clarity into clinical trials’ likely challenges and outcomes, increase efficiency and accelerate clinical programs—ultimately getting new and better therapies to patients more quickly.

Built primarily on a cloud computing environment powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and open-source technologies, and adaptable to clients’ existing tech infrastructures, ZS’s Clinical Design Center brings multiple data sets together—including real-world data, publicly available data, and private and third-party data—into one solution to make decision-making easier and more transparent. Acting as an accelerator, Clinical Design Center also offers flexibility in that it can be deployed within either a client’s or ZS’s environment.

Its intuitive dashboard provides a real-time view of ongoing clinical trials and competitive activities. For study leads and other functional users, the solution offers apps to address portfolio analysis and business development; design intelligence, study design and optimization; global enrollment monitoring and prediction; and clinical trial feasibility optimization, execution and monitoring. For analytics professionals and data scientists, the platform has a robust analytics workbench powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning that enables advanced, ad hoc and exploratory analytics.

Clinical Design Center also allows pharma executives to monitor clinical trial enrollment performance across studies, countries, sites and investigators; track key study-level risk parameters including the enrollment plan to target patient drop-offs and screen failures; and gain portfolio-level decision support that aims to create economies of scale.

“When you’re working on a rocket launch, you’re bringing multiple functions together in the control room, and they’re all acting on the same information and making well-coordinated decisions. This solution increases collaboration in much the same way,” says Venkat Sethuraman, the global clinical lead within ZS’s R&D excellence practice who drove the development and launch of the Clinical Design Center solution. “It’s like a Google Maps or GPS for clinical trial design,” he says. “It advises you on various directions that you can take based on your previous trial experiences, and obstacles that you could encounter, so that you can make better-informed decisions during clinical trial development.”

And Clinical Design Center is about more than the technology and analytics, says Aaron Mitchell, a ZS principal and global lead for ZS’s R&D excellence practice. “It also addresses the change management component, helping with organizational design, bringing people together to make decisions, and improving the decision-making capabilities of those individuals. It’s a holistic solution that helps companies all the way through to ensuring that decisions are effectively propagated throughout the organization.” – BioSpace