Designing Successful Clinical Trials

8 Mar 2024

12:00 -13:30

Times are shown in local time.

Open to: All

Castle Teaching Room (Cambridge Judge Business School)

Trumpington St

Cambridge

CB2 1AG

United Kingdom

See details

For any queries, please email Luke Slater Add to calendar

Join our Strategy and International Business seminar

Speaker: Dr Rebeca Mendez-Duron, Universitat de es Balears

About the seminar topic

Pharmaceutical companies spend large sums on the development of novel drugs, a significant portion of which arises from the high failure rates of compounds. This paper explores the potential contribution of clinical trial design to these failure rates. Specifically, we investigate whether certain aspects of clinical trial complexity, such as management challenges at testing sites and participant diversity, lead to higher variance in results and an increased likelihood of false negatives.

Our empirical analysis focuses on the correlates of success in transitioning from Phase II to Phase III clinical trials, exclusively examining first-in-class drug candidates. We find that factors such as disease scope and the disease experience of clinical testing sites significantly influence the likelihood of drug advancement. These findings underscore the importance of refining clinical trial design to mitigate the risk of prematurely terminating potentially efficacious drug programs.

Speaker bio

Rebeca is an Assistant Professor (tenured) at the University of the Balearic Islands. She earned her PhD in Business Administration and Quantitative Methods (2008) from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) under the supervision of Clara E García and Marco Giarratana. Her extensive background encompasses STEM, managerial, educational and technical training.

As a researcher, her main interests include social networks, innovation, organisational behaviour, and the open-source software and biopharmaceutical industries. She has published in the Journal of Evolutionary Economics, the Information and Management Journal, and R&D Management, along with several book chapters. She visited the Rotman School of Management (Canada, 2006) as a visiting PhD student and the Yale School of Management (USA, 2012) as a visiting Post-Doc, with fellowships from UC3M and the Ministry of Education, respectively. She has also visited the Universidad de Monterrey (MEX, 2017) and Auckland University of Technology (NZ, 2018). Currently, she is an Honorary Visiting Researcher at Cambridge Judge Business School under the Requalification of Professors sponsorship program. Her current research focuses on networks in the pharmaceutical industry and the management of clinical trials.

Register

No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.