Project Carbon: driving clinical trial sustainability
Date: 1st April 2022
Who to Contact: projectenquiries@pistoiaalliance.org
Problem Statement
There is an untapped, time-sensitive opportunity for members of the Pistoia Alliance to help the industry in evaluating the carbon footprint of clinical trials
Clinical trials are the lifeblood of the biopharmaceutical industry. Delivering clinical trials on time, to budget, to quality, with an acceptable patient burden and being patient diverse, is how the industry will continue to be successful and grow. Many stakeholders are now asking themselves and others to take seriously the question of carbon footprint and environmental sustainability in the delivery of clinical trials.
While the industry is on its way to measuring carbon footprint at a corporate level, at this moment in time, there is no thinking available at arguably a more important level – the level of the clinical trial. Across the entire industry, very little data is available in the public domain that indexes what a ‘typical clinical trial’ produces in terms of carbon footprint. This is an oversight that cannot be left unaddressed. There is therefore an opportunity to take a real thought leadership position in building a model that can tell us, what a ‘typical’ or illustrative clinical trial costs in terms of carbon footprint and read out a baseline
There is an even more interesting and compelling opportunity to build on from this baseline. As clinical trials become, rightly, more patient centric, there is an opportunity to model how the carbon footprint of a trial might change as you add in/ switch on patient engagement activities, decentralised clinical trial activities, patient diversity activities, risk based monitoring and other digital technologies. We can test for the first time, if being more patient centric is also good for the environment or perhaps, being patient centric comes at a trade off with sustainability?
We will develop a dynamic model that compares the carbon footprint of a clinical trial in traditional, hybrid and fully decentralised settings
The proposal, therefore, is to lead a coalition of the willing to build a dynamic model that:
Identifies the key drivers for carbon footprint in a clinical trial and produces estimates for what they are for a ‘typical’ clinical trial
Allows one to switch on and off at will, a menu of patient engagement, DCT and patient diversity activities that then allows one to see how the carbon footprint is affected
Is built in an agile way – where we create Minimum Viable Products at 3 month intervals and look to refine as we go through.
The outputs / findings from the model can be packaged into a thought paper / webinars/ panel discussions etc. The model itself will also be shared.