Monthly Archives: February 2011

From iPhones to Androids, there are several smartphones with apps out there for everyone, including drug developers. In a rapidly growing and changing industry like pharmaceuticals and biologics, it is important to stay on top of the latest trends in marketing and clinical trial development. Doing so not only keeps you ahead of the game, but, in some instances, it can improve the performance and/or effectiveness of your company’s efforts to reach its ultimate goal.

Over the past year and a half, several apps have been developed to help patients and physicians locate clinical trial sites. These apps have become beneficial tools for patients, physicians and pharmaceutical companies in regards to locating clinical trials sites and tracking a trial’s current enrollment progress.

So you may be asking, “Why make an app for locating clinical trials or for tracking enrollment?” The reason being is that clinical trials are critical to the drug approval process and searching for the right patients with the correct diagnosis and medical history to enter a clinical trial can be a major hurdle for many drug companies. The fact is that you can’t get supporting data when you aren’t able to enroll the number of patients required to give the study statistically significant data. More often than not, clinical trial enrollment is challenging, especially for some cancer therapies and drugs for rare diseases; these challenges can slow down the approval process, costing companies hundreds of thousands of dollars, an expense that ultimately gets passed on to the consumer if the drug gets approved.

This is where smartphone apps like TrialCentralNet by TCN e-Systems, CancerTrials App by GlaxoSmithKline and Medtrust, CT by TrialX and Clinical Trial 2.0 from Healogica are coming in handy. Patients, physicians and pharmaceutical companies can now have the latest information regarding clinical trials for new therapies in the palm of their hands.