More than 80% of clinical trials do not meet their deadlines because they struggle to find enough participants. Consequently, the current standard of care for clinical trials recommends reconsideration of candidate recruitment strategies as a priority.

Current candidate recruitment strategies, such as word of mouth referral requests from other hospitals, patient scanning using medical records within the clinical trial site, and condition or region-specific clinical trial portals, may enable identification of some candidates. However, these require significant manual labour, incur high costs and/or are limited to the pool of patients of a given hospital or demographic, leading to low and biased recruitment.

Low recruitment is mostly a consequence of a lack of awareness of ongoing trials and convoluted enrolment processes. It is paramount to tackle these two problems to come out with a successful solution.

A lesson to be learnt from the current Covid-19 pandemic is that clinical drug development and delivery of new drugs to patients can be accelerated by many years if we boost patient recruitment by connecting patients with trials and streamlining the enrolment process.

Clinical Net is a worldwide platform designed for users to easily find clinical trial information, connect people with clinical trials and automate clinical trial processes to accelerate drug development.