The start of February saw over 4,500 attendees representing 1,200+ organizations from 30 countries all coming together in Orlando, Florida for the 16th annual SCOPE Summit. There was a wide range of presentation topics touched on – including the latest industry trends, as well as the evolution of industry interests and issues over time. The focus of both presentations and conversations was clearly on optimizing clinical operations through innovation, budgeting & resourcing, site enablement, outsourcing, recruitment & engagement, patient-centric trials design & DEI and decentralized trials, digital health technologies and AI for clinical trials.
And just as the many talks, presentations and panels were full, the exhibit hall was bustling the entire time, which will come as no surprise to those who know the even grew almost 15% from last year – resulting in 300 companies exhibiting, 45 more than last year, and plenty of networking opportunities. For MRN, the space offered great opportunities to our team, Caroline Potts, Esther Maloney, Kerry Leyden, Jelena Kozyrickaja, Nicola Goatman and Laura Lange, to connect with old friends and foster new relationships and partnerships.
From our perspective, this year’s SCOPE summit allowed for a broad range of conversations – ranging from discussions on global expansion partnerships for in-home trial delivery, to using the MRN Site Network to support trial delivery in the US. We spoke with Sites, Sponsors, CROs, and Vendors – with all conversations sharing a common thread: collaboration to achieve objectives. Critically, attendees were open and transparent with each other, and seemed highly focused on finding the right solutions and partnering to build better trials.
This year, MRN’s focus at SCOPE was to highlight the challenges that patients face to simply get to clinical sites to participate in trials (since there is nothing simple about it for many) and how our solutions can create and expand clinical trial access for patients, no matter where they live. It’s an issue that that is at the heart of MRN’s mission – and in 2024, MRN launched a global Site Network to continue to expand reach to even more patients. With an existing network of thousands of sites, this formal, strategic trial delivery network has grown to over 200 sites in a single year. Our network not only works with sites we know, and have worked with before, but also supports sites that are trial-naive or struggle to get selected for research. If you attended the presentation by Caroline Potts, you would have learned of our recent success supporting a trial naïve site, now working with one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies (keep an eye out for news on that!). Through our discussions with individual sites both before and at SCOPE, we’ve gained an understanding of the biggest challenges they have when it comes to conducting research and have developed, and continue to develop, appropriate training, systems and operational delivery to best support all site-types in their clinical trial journey.
By supporting sites, we are able to deliver clinical trials in new communities, which in turn gives more patients greater access to care and Sponsors are able to more effectively and efficiently increase trial recruitment and retention.
Sites in our network have access to MRN’s close on 20 years’ experience of running clinical trials in the community. Through in-home clinical trial delivery, our mobile Healthcare Providers (HCPs) have delivered over 112,000 visits outside of a site setting. Pairing in-home delivery with on-site resourcing support, through a site in our network provides Sponsors and sites with tried-and-true recruitment and retention tools.
We are looking forward to next year’s SCOPE conference where we will share real-world examples of how our global site network is building research opportunities in new communities and expanding the geographical reach for Sponsors and sites alike.