Clinerion: Our whole industry seems to focus more and more on ‘Patient Centricity’. What does this term really mean for you, practically in your daily job?

Keyla Deucher: I think Patient Centricity is the humanization of clinical care in human research. Patient Centricity wants clinical trials to focus on the patient’s experience and needs. Our challenge as Clinical Research professionals is to fulfil our scientific role, while not forgetting to involve patients as much as we can. [...]

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Patients are being involved more and more, even at the early stages of clinical trials: many protocols are now designed using patient experience, and rely on real-world data more than before - which is an interesting shift, as we know patient-focused trials are proven to be more successful.

As healthcare professionals involved in trials, our job is to increase patients’ autonomy and engagement. In our daily activity, this means we need to talk more to the patients and inform them better, to make them understand their role in the trial and improve their experience. The more they know, the more active and engaged they will become, and the more successful the trial will be.

Clinerion: How does "Real World Data" support Clinical Trials?

Keyla Deucher: This is another interesting part of this “Patient Centricity” shift: using real-world data during the protocol design phase will support more consistency in terms of the design itself, and better outcomes. For example, many clinical trials are performed in Brazil, but the way these trials are designed is based on the needs of European and American patients - which doesn’t necessarily reflect the reality in Brazil. That’s where there’s clear room for improvement, and that’s why real world data should be used to design trial protocols.

Clinerion: How do you think Clinical Trials will evolve over the next few years? 

I think real world evidence will be generated more and more in the future to speed up the clinical trials process, and to improve trials and patient outcomes. We’ll use information that is already available, and that patients accept to share. Artificial Intelligence is also one of the important ongoing changes in clinical trials, as it’s a very useful tool to support real world evidence. The future for both pharma professionals AND patients will be: more and more data becoming available and exploitable, the systematic use of this real-world data, and patients becoming more and more involved at all steps of the trials.