Trial transformation: how can we prevent early-stage clinical trials being ‘self-limiting’?

IDEA Pharma Chief Medical Officer Alexander Gray sat down for a discussion with Transformation in Trials—a podcast on the best ways to improve clinical studies via multiple avenues to spur better, more impactful, and more streamlined drug development—about the importance of embracing possibility and avoiding self-imposed limitations before an asset even moves into the clinic.

“In pre-clinical research, they are already making decisions about which areas they would prefer to operate in,” said Gray during the interview. “But there may be other places that the molecule is potentially as good or even better that they didn’t look at.”

“The innovative potential of early-phase clinical trials in Life Sciences today can be lost since the indication is locked in too early in the process,” wrote Transformation in Trials in its episode introduction. “Especially in broad disease areas such as immunology, oncology and CNS, having a firm TPP in Phase 2 makes little sense: better to use this stage of development to understand what the asset might be capable of. Allowing the asset to lead to the indication, through a more open view of hypothesis testing on Phase 2, can lead to better asset-indication matches and better results in further clinical trials.”

You can listen to the full episode here (it’s available on just about every podcast platform), and visit Transformation in Trials’ site for access to many more fascinating interviews about the current and future state of drug R&D.