11 Jan The long-term impact of COVID-19 on clinical trials: Part 1

By James Gillespie, John Whyte, and Greg Licholai, Clinical Leader

Pandemics provide a massive pressure-test of healthcare systems, allowing us to isolate what works well and what merits improvement. The COVID-19 pandemic is going to create a “new normal” regarding resetting the equilibrium in a variety of policies, procedures, and processes. Pandemics and other profound unexpected changes (i.e., so called black swan events, which are defined as the potential for dramatic impact of highly improbable events) serve to accelerate changes in business models and can create completely new categories of businesses. COVID-19 may cause fundamental alterations in how businesses compete. And because there will be unintended and unpredicted consequences of COVID-19, caution is warranted when making concrete predictions because there is significant uncertainty on how scenarios will play out. Once the outbreak is fully contained, many activities may revert back to normal, but many will be changed forever. The most lasting impact may be psychological as events such as these can produce transformative changes on beliefs, norms, and views, including for the life sciences industry and the drug development process. Interestingly, as measured by cost and length, the pre-pandemic environment for clinical trials has been described as unsustainable by many observers, so this massive change also presents ripe opportunities for improvement. Read more …