TECH OUTLOOKDecember - 20209In order to offer the most efficient high quality services, ACI Clinical has embraced a cloud computing strategy. As demand for our clinical endpoint adjudication software and services grow, our move to the cloud was imperative, so we can easily "dial up" the scale and performance. An elastic cloud infrastructure can expand or contract with demand and as a company, we only pay for the infrastructure we actually use, which in turn allows us to pass the benefits to our customers.Examining the Effective and Proactive Use of DataIt is true that across the industry and even within individual companies, data is often held in information silos. The reuse of clinical trial data to answer questions not envisioned in the original protocol or study design is still rare. This is partially due to the regulatory approval-driven process of pharma research, competitive intellectual property protection, as well as technical issues such as the use of non-standardized research data formats and specifications.As clinical data integration is expensive, ACI Clinical recommends to its clients that integration should be driven by the potential questions that such integration may answer. We have found that data integration often requires the highest expertise of our clinical and statistical experts to thoroughly understand the study designs, patient populations, endpoints and interventions. If proper care is not taken in regard to the integration, you may end up with a technically well integrated clinical database that can lead to false or misleading conclusions. Even if the clinical data collected from multiple trials were standardized using published clinical data standards, such as those from the CDISC organization, you need to have a core content understanding prior to the integration.The value and benefits of data integration and clinical data sharing are to the entire research community, not necessarily or specifically to an individual life sciences company. For example, a company that did not collect original data on a compound, may derive great value from the availability of shared and well integrated clinical data to prevent them from going down a blind alley or research dead end, saving valuable capital and scientific resources. In another example, shared data could allow a company to evaluate and possibly model the "potential" effects of a known substance on a new patient population, in order to design a prospective study to minimize the potential safety risks of the exposure of that substance to a new patient population, as well as to better measure its efficacy effects. ACI Clinical is pleased and proud to participate in efforts within the academic, commercial and regulatory sectors to promote and enable clinical data sharing by individual companies or via independent "clinical data clearing houses" that evaluate the scientific and ethical merits of a proposed use case of shared clinical data. It is true that across the industry and even within individual companies, data is often held in information silosMark Williams
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