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Japan-based Aculys Pharma has entered into a contract with SUSMED, Inc., a company that promotes digital medicine, to conduct the world's first corporate-sponsored clinical trial using blockchain technology.
The clinical trial utilizing this blockchain technology, provided by SUSMED, will be conducted in collaboration with CMIC Co., a pioneer in drug development support (CRO), with the cooperation of several medical institutions.
With the sophistication of research and development and the increasing cost of new drug development, improving the efficiency of clinical trials is one of the challenges in the pharmaceutical industry that requires addressing.
This clinical trial which utilizes blockchain technology significantly reduces the number of processes around data entry at medical institutions and Source Data Verification (SDV) compared to conventional methods, and also contributes to reducing the number of required CRA visits to the medical institutions. In addition, by taking advantage of blockchain technology, it is expected to have the effect of increasing the reliability of the clinical trial data itself.
Through these methods, the aim is to improve the efficiency of the clinical trial-related work-streams necessary for new drug development, and to optimize new drug development costs without compromising reliability.