A report issued in July of this year, featured the use of a Just-in-Time (JIT) approach to speed up patient enrollment in oncology clinical trials. Collaboration between Cancer Treatment Centers of America and a division of PPD has been able to shorten site activation from a typical 8 months down to 2 weeks! This improves patient access to potentially life-changing therapies while speeding up the ability to evaluate treatments to conquer cancer.

https://www.ppdi.com/news-and-events/news/2019/july-16-optimal-cancer-trials

The JIT approach is based on establishing a community of sites with prenegotiated contracts and terms, which provides immediate engagement by sites to search for patients. Patients are identified first, triggering the activation of sites, enabling patients to be enrolled within two weeks. As a result of the efficiencies of this process, there are zero non-enrolling sites.

This is a huge improvement. Faster startup will allow the pharma/biotech companies to more quickly assess if a drug candidate is working or not. This is a better and more efficient use of everyone involved in conducting a clinical trial, vastly improving productivity of the process.