Innovation in Clinical Trials is Possible: The Hidden Opportunity in the Coronavirus Disease-2019 Emergency.
The coronavirus disease-2019 emergency has clearly shown the need to discover, test and produce a new vaccine
but also in general the fragility of the current chain of clinical trials. Through this emergency, is it possible to look at the current clinical trial processes with new eyes? Is it possible to seize the opportunity for change and to have confidence in the possibility of their improvement? In this short article the authors wanted to give an optimistic answer to this question by pushing on the possibilities of innovation nowadays.
However, only a small fraction of the world population knows the actual timing for placing a vaccine on the market; and that in addition to the research and development phase, a clinical trial phase is required which takes the same amount of time dedicated to research and development, if not more.
Therefore, large and small pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies must be able to see in the COVID-19 emergency an opportunity for renewal, by rethinking in an innovative way the clinical trial processes, still highly depended by actions with a high human content, also considering that patient behavior and the demands of hospitals and doctors are evolving rapidly.
So, while most people in the world today wonder when the COVID-19 vaccine will arrive, we try to reflect if more generally we can reduce the time to market of a vaccine, a drug or a medical device, and just in case how to do it.
Clin Trial Pract Open J. 2020; 3(1): 15-19. doi: 10.17140/CTPOJ-3-113
