With due consideration to the late writer Maya Angelou’s paraphrased sentiment that “you can’t really know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been,” Signature Series panelists who gathered at ACRP 2026 in Orlando on Saturday (April 25) weighed in on the theme of “Embrace the Now, Ignite What’s Next” for the clinical research enterprise.
Telling the clinical research professional attendees in a packed auditorium that their collective work has left an indelible imprint on the drug and device research and development industry, panel moderator Jennifer Byrne, Chief Executive Officer and Board Director, Javara, then probed the guest panelists about how they entered the field and where they believe current trends are taking its people and processes.
Participating in the panel were Barbara Bierer, Faculty Director of the Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Kevin Bugin, Associate Vice President of Global Regulatory Policy and Intelligence, Amgen; Rob DiCicco, Vice President of Portfolio Management, TransCelerate Biopharma Inc.; and Morgan Hanger, Executive Director of the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative, a collaborative program of Duke University and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Among the perspectives shared, the panelists spoke to the need for “a North Star for seeing patients as consumers,” the feeling that a “huge evolution and inflection point in studies” is forthcoming in terms of data design, how deployment of Quality by Design principles is needed to simplify trials that have become increasingly complex and unwieldy, and the necessity of finding more ways to include and empower people in clinical studies rather than making them even more exclusive than they already are. The panelists also touched upon uses of artificial intelligence and digital protocols in clinical research, encouraging signs from steps being taken toward interoperability of more trial-related data systems, and the translational aspects of research in terms of bringing its benefits to the point of care for expanding pools of patients.
Reported by Gary Cramer
