Site Feasibility and Selection
Recruit on time and retain the trial population.
With a difficult funding situation, no sponsor CEO wants to announce to shareholders that a trial is running slowly and that more sites are needed as that is also more cost. So, two key determinants of success are to recruit on time and to retain the trial population, and the retention can be forgotten. Globally, more than 80% of trials fail to enrol on time and a subject dropout rate of 25% is also common and may be avoidable.
A study has the potential to go well or badly from the choice of sites. The usual CRO fast feasibility may not define optimal sites and CROs can be rather fast to offer more sites.
Gaea invests its own funds with in-depth feasibility of countries and sites to ground our proposal for a study as well as we can, and upon project award, this is followed by effective qualification. Again, the often simple qualification many CROs do will fail to reveal issues that will slow down activation, or the actual start of screening.