Member Spotlight: Q&A with eClinical Solutions

Aug 02, 2021

Every month, MassBio spotlights a member company and the great work they’re doing to advance the life sciences industry and support the patients we serve. In August, we spoke with Raj Indupuri, CEO, eClinical Solutions. Raj has been a leader in life sciences digitization for more than 20 years. With a unique blend of hands-on technical and data management experience, Raj works to advance the eClinical Solutions strategic vision and the delivery of cloud-based solutions.

Tell us about your organization, its mission, and current initiatives.

eClinical Solutions helps life sciences organizations regain control of their clinical data and get faster insights into their trials, accelerating the speed to market for life-saving drugs and therapies. Our mission is to make clinical research data acquisition and analysis easy and intelligent to help bring new treatments to patients faster. By combining software with clinical data services, we empower clients with all their clinical data lifecycle needs.

Over the past decade, the volume, variety, and velocity of data sources in clinical trials has grown. The elluminate® Clinical Data Cloud enables seamless ingestion, standardization, and analysis of clinical data from any source or structure for analysis and efficient decision making. Our data services team leverages deep clinical trial expertise, alongside the elluminate platform, to improve outcomes for clients and patients.

As clinical trials become more patient-centric and use decentralized models, the life sciences industry needs data-driven approaches to accelerate research and results. We continue to innovate with a platform-centric approach and an increased focus on automation by leveraging advanced technologies and AI/ML to drive rapid modernization of clinical trials.

How do your organization’s activities help patients now and into the future? 

Clinical trials have become increasingly complex over the years. Between genomics, wearables, biomarkers, labs, and EDC data, most sponsors are collecting from at least ten different data sources — and this continues to expand. This has created data chaos and has significantly impacted trial cycle times, with a 40 percent increase in Last Patient Last Visit to database lock time. 

By automating and eliminating inefficiencies across the entire clinical trial data value chain, eClinical and elluminate help to accelerate cycle times. With real-time data access, teams can accelerate data review, centralize monitoring and implement risk-based approaches to ensure that KPIs are being met. With data standardization, elluminate also improves the data submission process to reduce cycle times. Using our platform and services, life sciences organizations see up to 40–50% improved efficiencies for data ingestion, review, monitoring, and submission. Our platform is future-ready and is imperative for modern digital trials.

What do you see as the biggest challenge facing the life sciences industry today?

The Covid-19 pandemic was a catalyst for the digitization and modernization of clinical trials. It has caused an increased awareness of clinical trials, which is very good for the industry as it enables us to reach more patients than ever before. The valuable lessons learned from the rapid development of the Covid-19 trials and vaccines were the catalyst needed for digital transformation in the industry. 

Unfortunately, the industry still struggles with massive R&D inefficiencies, including long cycle times and increased costs. While decentralized trials and patient-centric approaches are exciting, these require significant innovation to accelerate research. The biggest challenge will be for industry leaders and stakeholders to drive change and the willingness to adapt without going back to the old ways. The industry recognizes that technology is a key enabler to drive the transformation needed. With sustained change, research can be accelerated, and cycle times can be reduced to bring treatments to patients faster.

What’s next for your organization / what are you focused on in the coming year? 

To improve drug development and address the data chaos problem, we’re innovating platform-centric and data-driven approaches. We believe companies need to invest in modern data infrastructures to harness the value of all existing and collected data. We are focused on increasing automation in our platform by expanding existing capabilities and leveraging advanced AI/ML. The objective is to reduce manual work, allowing trial teams to focus on their specialties. As the volume of clinical trial data increases — and the industry implements new decentralized trial models — we enable scalable approaches with our clinical cloud software. Our goal is to accelerate time to value and provide better experiences for all stakeholders involved in the clinical trials data value chain. 

The industry is currently experiencing massive investments into science. We are focused on providing the future-ready data and analytics infrastructure to harness the industry’s most valuable asset and currency — data.

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