Over the last few decades, there have been more new drug launches than ever before, with a recordbreaking 59 approvals by the FDA in 2018 (1). This has, in part, been fueled by the shift to treatments customised for rare diseases and personalised medicines, which accounted for 42% of all approvals last year (2). The pace of innovation has accelerated as researchers and scientists challenge the frontiers of genomics, microbiology, and diagnostics, contributing to a dramatic rise in the number of trials demanded in the growing life science industry (3).
However, while breakthroughs continue to be made, the path to bring new medicines to market has not shortened. In fact, the drug development process has become increasingly complex, and the pace of trials is slow (4). Finding targeted patient populations and investigators to participate in trials is difficult as sponsor companies compete to collect more and more clinical research data, much of which is difficult and time-consuming to measure (5).
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