Technology’s Impact
Almost wherever you go, and whatever you do in this modern world, whether it’s traveling overseas, ordering a pizza off of an app, buying clothing online, doing your work on a laptop, going to the movies, or visiting a doctor or hospital, you can see the impact of technological advancements. Without the many improvements we’ve had in various sectors, we would probably still be taking a horse and cart on all our errands instead of a car and writing letters to be hand delivered by a postman instead of sending a text or an email. Medicine, thankfully, is one of the sectors that has seen the most benefit from technological advances. We’ve only had pacemakers since 1936; imagine how many lives those little devices have saved or extended. The first fetal ultrasound was conducted successfully in 1958; now, it is a standard part of any pregnancy, and parents-to-be simply wouldn’t feel comfortable without it. The first successful CT scan was performed in 1971, only 51 years ago. 1993 three saw the construction and use of the first successful bionic limb, 2004 saw the birth of the adaptive artificial knee, and 2013 brought 3D printed body parts. Without these technological advancements that we now take somewhat for granted, the medical profession would be back in the dark ages, no matter how skilled our medical professionals were. Clinical Ink is one of the companies on the frontline of medical technological advancements. Only this time, it’s not a limb or a colossal machine that they’ve built, but how they’ve managed to harness modern technology to hasten the speed of clinical trials in a time when we’ve been desperate for answers.
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COVID and Clinical Trials
When COVID first swept the world, we were unprepared, to say the least. The idea of a pandemic of global proportions hitting the modern world again was not something on the radar for most of us. Sad as it has been, the hit has been significant. Not only did numerous other clinical trials grind to a halt in the face of a virus that we can’t seem to find a cure for, but the medical community of the world also needed to come up with a way to develop some sort of vaccine at an incredibly accelerated rate. Since the idea of having actual COVID patients in a traditional trial didn’t seem feasible, Clinical Ink knew that they had to do better. They had to find a better, faster way of trialing potentially life-saving vaccines…and they did. Instead of doing things the way they had always done, Clinical Ink put together a totally new and innovative system: a virtual clinical trial. Specialists conceived and implemented an electronic study environment for cytokine storms in an astonishing 15 working days. An incredible amount of admin goes into even beginning to think about a clinical trial; the research, the permissions- it’s astounding. Those 15 days were spent creating the study’s entire assessment schedule, the logic behind it, and building and testing the user interface.
Clinical Ink experts tell us that under normal conditions, just the build-up to a study like this would take more or less 12 weeks. The team was able to save time by conducting edit checks the whole way through the process: real-time edits radically reduce the number of queries that would usually be put forward in a study like this.
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The cytokine storm is one of the trickiest COVID symptoms for severely suffering patients to be saddled with. The body has a severe immune reaction and releases far more cytokines than it usually would. While cytokines are an essential part of the body’s immune response, a release of that magnitude causes its own set of problems: multiorgan failure, hyperpermeability, and mortality, in some cases. The drug at the center of Clinical Ink’s research was an intravenous anti-inflammatory. This brand new entity was a granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor antagonist.
Thanks to Clinical Ink’s Lumenis platform and its eSource and Direct Data Capture capabilities, medical professionals were able to conduct a safe and effective clinical trial in record time. Could you imagine living in an age where we don’t have computers, ventilators, or machines to monitor heart rates and conditions inside the human body? Without these advancements in technology, our medical professionals would be flying blind without the ability to look inside our bodies, blood, and cells to find out what’s actually going on.
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Wrap Up
Thankfully, here in 2022, things in the medical world have resumed a degree of normalcy in most places. While infection still rages in some parts of the world and medical professionals are struggling to keep up, in other areas, hospitals have been able to return to the daily business of medical care, which includes running clinical trials for many other conditions. We hope that, before long, our world can return to life as we knew it before the pandemic with the help of medical technology.
