TrialSpark Increases Speed of Clinical Development on AWS

Clinical development can be slowed by inefficient processes, high variability throughout the research spectrum, and a lack of standardized technology platforms that can run end-to-end clinical trials.

TrialSpark, a clinical research provider, created a patient-centric technology platform named Pilot that runs clinical trials from beginning to end—combining recruitment, eSource, EDC and eCTMF to streamline the trial process. Efficient clinical trials are critical to the development of pharmaceuticals. “The patent life of a drug is ticking from the minute it is identified,” says Joe Zaccaria, client growth director at TrialSpark. Pilot removes the obstacles for independent physicians to participate in clinical research by powering the site for each study, thereby increasing standardization and accessing untapped investigators and patient pools. TrialSpark strives to democratize access and open up trials beyond the 2 percent of patients that typically participate in clinical research. This results in patient pools that are more diverse than traditional sites, with more than double the number of non-white patients enrolled in active trials compared to industry averages.

TrialSpark’s Pilot streamlines the clinical trial process by using three Amazon Web Services (AWS) products: Amazon Connect, an omni-channel cloud contact center that helps companies provide superior customer service at a lower cost; Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance; and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Pilot’s direct data capture leads to zero transcription errors, and has demonstrated site recruitment that is 40 percent faster than the national average. In one study the TrialSpark platform recruited about 30 percent of the patients in the study even though it was responsible for less than 20 percent of activated sites in the trial. “AWS let us create an infrastructure that can be reused by biopharma sponsors as they scale to reduce some of those inefficiencies associated with trial startups,” says Zaccaria. During the COVID-19 pandemic, TrialSpark was able to maintain clinical trial operations through remote visits and monitoring and remote data entry enabled by Pilot and AWS.