Cytel Blog

With only two weeks left for this fabulous year to end, we would like to thank all our blog subscribers and new readers for following and appreciating the Cytel blog. This year, we collaborated with several experts from both within and outside the company to bring to you a range of interesting topics including real-world evidence, AI, challenges in rare diseases, patient-reported outcomes, data management, and our popular series “The Good Data Submission Doctor” and “Career Perspectives”. In this blog, we share with you the top 5 Cytel blogs that resonated most with our community in 2019.

Subscribe to Cytel blog and stay updated on the latest developments in the industry.

No one plans to have a trial whose data collection needs rescuing. However, lagging enrollment rates, operational struggles, and diminished budgets can leave some trials in need of intervention. A great deal has been written about how to prevent the need for rescues (e.g., more investment in study planning and improved communication between stakeholders). Far less has been said about how to assemble a rescue team – the roles that need to be filled and the process of analysis that ensures the completion of a failing trial.

Happy New Year! As we look ahead to future successes and the new advancements in drug development that 2019 will bring, we are taking a moment to reflect on the topics that resonated most with our community on the Cytel blog in 2018. While these 6 most popular blogs encompass a variety of topics from across the data science, statistics, and statistical programming space, they all have in common a focus on innovative practices and application of statistical, data management, and data science excellence to achieve better outcomes in drug development.

The Society for Clinical Data Management (SCDM) conference brought clinical data managers from around the world to Seattle-Bellevue, WA on September 23-26. The conference offered an unmatched opportunity to discover innovative solutions in the clinical data management industry. In this blog, we will share our data management colleagues' experiences, observed trends and contributions to the program.

In this blog, we share a new infographic based on this popular blog post illustrating some of the critical interactions that need to take place between data management and statistics groups to help ensure efficiency and data quality. 

A number of the Cytel team were in Amsterdam, 3rd- 6th June 2018 for the PSI Conference. This year’s conference was held at the magnificent Beurs Van Berlage, a venue full of history and interesting architectural features. We took the opportunity to give delegates a first look at OK GO, our new clinical trial Go/No-Go decision-making software in this magnificent setting.

In this blog, we'll summarize some of the particular highlights from the sessions that our team members attended.

Data management is an essential building block for successful Immuno-Oncology (I-O) trials. At the Immuno-Oncology Clinical Trials operations meeting in New York in earlier this year,  Patti Arsenault, VP Quality Assurance at Cytel discussed with Christopher Lamplugh, AVP, Clinical Data Management, Global Data Operations at Merck, the key challenges for data management in the space, and what’s needed to overcome them. 

There is a consensus in the industry that data on rare diseases is limited, incomplete, and difficult to find or access. Recently we came across the CoRDS patient registry based at Sanford University and learned that the registry is an effective tool used to gather information useful to researchers studying rare diseases.

We sat down with Benjamin Forred, Project Manager, and Austin Letcher, Senior Research Associate at CoRDS to learn more about the registry and hopes for the future.

Each year Halloran Consulting Group hosts‘CORE’ (Clinical Operations Retreat for Executives) as a forum for industry executives to discuss pressing challenges in a collaborative environment. This year, our Senior V.P. of Clinical Research Services, Irving Dark, discussed the topic of vendor qualification and posed the question to the group: are there better alternatives to the traditional qualification audit process? In this blog, we present Irving’s proposal for an innovative approach that could improve efficiency and allow sponsors to invest more time evaluating the operational and cultural aspects that have greater potential to ensure the success of a partnership