Patient-centered collaboration to swiftly migrate to decentralized clinical trials

When it comes to cancer diagnosis and prevention, delivering groundbreaking solutions to market safely and quickly can save lives. That’s the mission for Quest Diagnostics and many of the industry pioneers it works with, including Thrive, an Exact Sciences company that develops innovative, novel solutions to detect cancer early in disease progression.

Wanted: specific demographic for clinical trials

As part of their development of a new cancer screening, the organization needed to conduct tests for false positives, so they were looking to enroll healthy individuals in a specific age range for clinical trials.

The challenge? The traditional requirement of in-person clinical trial participation was already restrictive and had been greatly exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic—with so many stay-at-home orders, healthy people weren’t out and about. The organization knew they needed to work with individuals at home where they’d be more comfortable but needed to find those who matched their trial criteria.

They turned to Quest for help, knowing it had a vast network and a unique set of capabilities to reach out to the right individuals.

The results: better engagement and retention

Quest was able to help Thrive flip the traditional clinical trial model of anchored investigational sites and principal investigator (PI)-based outreach, and:

• Match and connect potentially qualified patients with trial options using comprehensive lab and clinical data based on inclusion and exclusion criteria
• Foster collaborative relationships between physician communities and investigators
• Deliver on expanded recruitment and screening by leveraging established physician relationships

For Thrive, this direct connection resulted in much higher response and retention rates in significantly less time for lower overall cost, and accelerated approval, availability, and adoption of multi-cancer screening solutions.