TrialSpark and Pfizer collaborating to improve speed and access to clinical trials

New York, NY, Tuesday, September 17, 2019 – 08:03 am EDT

TrialSpark, a technology company committed to improving the speed, access, and reliability of clinical trials, and Pfizer have entered into a multi-year collaboration to extend Pfizer clinical trials to community doctors who have not previously been study investigators. TrialSpark partners with doctors to create GCP/ICH-compliant clinical trial sites in their existing practices by providing training, technology, and resources and research staff needed to execute clinical trials with high quality. This model allows patients to join a clinical trial under the continued care of their own doctor.

“To accelerate the delivery of innovative new medicines to those who are waiting for them, we need to make our trials accessible to more people. Pfizer is working within our own organization and with partners to pursue multiple novel approaches to expanding access,” said Rod MacKenzie, Chief Development Officer, Pfizer. “We hope that our collaboration with TrialSpark will enable us to reach patients who otherwise may have been unaware of or unable to participate in a Pfizer clinical trial.”

Pfizer is collaborating with TrialSpark to pioneer the company’s model of creating clinical trial sites with the doctors who see patients who may be eligible for a particular clinical program. By using anonymized, aggregated data to identify geographical clusters with a significant number of patients in a given indication, Pfizer and TrialSpark can identify potential new sites, share tools and training they need to run a trial, and help the sites to identify patients within the practice that would potentially benefit from a clinical trial. The collaboration between Pfizer and TrialSpark is currently focused on clinical trials in inflammation and immunology, with programs running or starting in vitiligo, atopic dermatitis, psoriasis and alopecia.

“Many doctors are interested in participating in clinical trials, but don’t know where to start,” said Benjamine Liu, CEO and co-founder of TrialSpark. “Doctors in our network are motivated by the opportunity to offer investigational medicines to their patients who would otherwise not have access to them and contribute to the advancement of new medicines. Allowing doctors to bring clinical trials directly to their patients should reduce the time and financial costs of accessing novel investigational medicines and make trials accessible to patients and doctors who have traditionally been difficult to reach.”

About TrialSpark
TrialSpark’s mission is to bring treatments to patients faster and more efficiently by reimagining the clinical trial process. TrialSpark has scaled a network of trial sites by partnering with doctors to create clinical trial sites within their existing practices. TrialSpark runs trials out of these doctors’ practices using a roaming cohort of certified research coordinators, optimized by software, data, and technology. Without variability in operations at the trial site level, TrialSpark cuts out the manual, time intensive, and costly tasks that delay clinical trial timelines. By creating trial sites with doctors, TrialSpark unlocks the 98% of patients who have never been exposed to trials, boosting recruitment and enrollment rates and democratizing access.