Accelerating Clinical Research Using Cloud Technology

Accelerating Clinical Research Using Cloud Technology

With the aim of helping individuals overcome health issues, clinical research is an important field where doctors, drug experts and biologists work together to unravel the causative factors and suitable treatment plans for the most critical health problems. The major pitfall to clinical research is that it is both time consuming and costly. Some drugs and treatments take years of study, experiments, trials, and tests before finally being made available, albeit, there being no guarantee of success, for public consumption. The total cost of developing a new drug typically exceeds $1 billion owing to stringent ethical norms and slow approvals for large clinical trials. Therefore, there is an increasing demand on clinical trial laboratories to change the way clinical research is performed so as to minimize costs and speed up research and development (R&D), which in turn, will produce better and faster outcomes. Additionally, clinical research needs to be carried out in a much more connected environment, where clinical laboratories can easily collaborate with other organization such as smaller biotech firms, universities, biobanks, etc., to discover and develop novel drugs.

To improve patient-centered and regulatory-approved treatments, R&D organizations should formulate a plan to effectively drive clinical data management through informed treatment decisions quickly. The existing protocols for clinical research are typically slow and error-prone due to lack of informatics tools for accessing and sharing clinical data across multiple research groups in real time. This results in further delays in the development of drugs. Cloud-based technologies are emerging as one of the most viable options for streamlining the heavily regulated clinical research processes with minimal R&D expenditure.