The recruitment of minority patients is hard under any circumstances. But finding research subjects for conditions with a social stigma is especially difficult. Barbara Gladson is director of the biopharma educational initiative at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ). She gave a fascinating presentation on her work at the 2010 annual Drug Information…more...

If you're a clinical research site accepting studies from industry, you've probably seen it. The dreaded cross-indemnification clause. It's an increasingly common element of standard contracts. Under cross indemnification, sites take full responsibility if anything goes wrong. That responsibility attaches to the site whether or not a mishap was its fault or the sponsor's. Such clauses have…more...

In the early 1990s, site management organizations (SMOs) began to form. The idea was simple. Sponsors would be happier if they could go to a single company that served as the management headquarters of many sites, instead of having to approach many disparate, individually run sites separately and forge contracts with each. SMOs like Radiant Research started…more...

Within the sprawling Loma Linda Veterans Healthcare System in Redlands, California, sits the non-profit research arm Loma Linda Veterans Association for Research and Education , and in a corner of its 54,000 square foot space in the hospital, there sits the small Clinical Research Group, hard at work on Phase III and IV projects. The 12-person team…more...

In watching respiratory therapists recruit for two studies under way in her departments at both Mount Sinai Hospital and SickKids Hospital in Toronto, neonatologist Sharon Unger thought she saw a trend. It appeared that respiratory therapists were talking to far more parents about entering their infants into the large, multi-center trial that rewarded recruiters for successfully enrolling…more...

Last month, BBK Worldwide, a technology-savvy patient recruitment firm, opened a new office in Los Angeles to complement headquarters in Boston and satellite locations in London, Prague and Osaka. Biotechnology companies of all sizes, in Los Angeles and San Diego, were the draw for the new location. But for Bonnie Brescia, a founding principal of the company,…more...

As a large commercial site, how do you get all your investigators to truly support what you're doing? By inviting them to actually buy in. That's what Jacksonville Center for Clinical Research did in 1997 when it spun off from a cardiology practice. “Doctors were given the choice of continuing to just be principal investigators or buying…more...

We asked Quintiles to tell us about one of the most improved sites or site networks in its five-year-old partner sites program. The contract research organization (CRO) introduced us to Piedmont Medical Research, a group of 11 sites in North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. The network is based in Winston-Salem, N.C. It's comprised of nine sites…more...