The first Clinical Outsourcing Group: CRO Summit was held in Raleigh on Dec. 3-4, 2024. The event brought together more than 200 attendees to explore opportunities for improving collaboration between sponsors and clinical research organizations (CROs).  

“The mission of this event is to improve the sector,” said Jasmina Jankicevic, chief medical officer at Innovaderm Research and event chairperson. “In the rapidly evolving landscape of clinical research, we need a forum for discussing universal challenges that sponsors and CROs face. Together, we can find solutions to elevate our overall performance. In the end, it’s all about bringing innovative therapies to market quickly for the patients who need them.” 

The summit focused on leveraging partnerships and technology integration to reduce costs and gain efficiencies in clinical trials. Industry experts discussed how technology can be used to automate complex processes, help junior staffers be more efficient, and scale experienced staffers to get more done. 

During a C-suite panel discussion, executives offered their strategic outlook for navigating the future amidst rapid technological changes, evolving funding models, and shifting healthcare dynamics. Business leaders encouraged attendees to lean into technoloy so that CRO staff can concentrate on high value work, such as relationship building with personnel at clinical sites. 

Cautious optimism on artificial intelligence's role in clinical trials

The time has come for artificial intelligence (AI) to be used to improve clinical trials. Several use cases were explored, including AI helping sponsors and CROs select the best clinical sites for studies, improving patient recruitment, designing new protocols, and predicting patient behavior to minimize risk in clinical trials. 

However, experts cautioned that AI is not a magic bullet as it can provide flawed solutions because underlying data sets might be too small to be statistically sound or could lack context.

When approaching AI, panelists suggested starting with small projects where there’s a clear challenge to be solved and ones where AI could present a good return on investment. By tackling these projects first, it will help AI naysayers gain more confidence in the technology. Panelists also suggested integrating AI solutions into current IT systems and workflows to gain full adoption. Solutions that require users to login into another system may complicate in-person patient interaction and never be used. To keep pace with the CRO sector, attendees were encouraged to start AI projects now, fail early and often, and learn from those failures to create new AI-powered solutions. 

Exhibition featured enabling technologies

To enhance CRO-sponsor relationships, 19 exhibitors were on hand to discuss their technologies and capabilities. Exhibitors included BioBridges, Block Clinical, the Biomedical Research Alliance of NY (BRANY), Clario, Leapcure, MyData-TRUST, Perceptive eclinical, Prevail InfoWorks, Saba Global, Patient Recruiting Agency, TrialStat, and Univo IRB. 

In addition to the program and exhibition, attendees had ample opportunities to make new professional connections and expand their networks. 

The event organizers selected Raleigh for their inaugural event given the Triangle region’s reputation for being an important CRO hub. The CRO Summit will return to Raleigh on Dec. 2-3, 2025, with an inaugural CRO Summit Europe planned for September 2025 in Amsterdam. 

The COG Series also features Biopharma focused meetings held in London; Malmo, Sweden; Boston; Bethesda, Maryland; Burlingame, California; and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. More information about these events can be found here.