Assessing the Financial Value of Decentralized Clinical Trials

Deployment of remote and virtual clinical trial methods and technologies, referred to collectively as decentralized clinical trials (DCTs), represents a profound shift in clinical trial practice. To our knowledge, a comprehensive assessment of the financial net benefits of DCTs has not been conducted.

We developed an expected net present value (eNPV) model of the cash flows for new drug development and commercialization to assess the financial impact of DCTs. The measure of DCT value is the increment in eNPV that occurs, on average, when DCT methods are employed in comparison to when they are not. The model is populated with parameter values taken from published studies, Tufts CSDD benchmark data, and Medable Inc. data on DCT projects. We also calculated the return on investment (ROI) in DCTs as the ratio of the increment in eNPV to the DCT implementation cost.

We found substantial value from employing DCT methods in phase II and phase III trials. If we assume that DCT methods are applied to both phase II and phase III trials the increase in value is $20 million per drug that enters phase II, with a seven-fold ROI.

DCTs can provide substantial extra value to sponsors developing new drugs, with high returns to investment in these technologies. Future research on this topic should focus on expanding the data to larger datasets and on additional aspects of clinical trial operations not currently measured.