How are you investing to improve research in the next decade?

I recently had the honor of co-chairing the first investing conference at the SCOPE Clinical Trial event. We had corporate venture groups from big pharma, family offices, VCs, and a wide range of strategic investors. It was one of those "meetings of the minds" that doesn't seem to happen enough, but when it does, is memorable. Here are my opening comments.

It is my pleasure to welcome you to the first Venture, Innovation, & Partnering Conference at SCOPE.?Before we get started, I want to thank Edel O'Regan Ph.D. , and the SCOPE team Cambridge Innovation Institute , my co-chairs Konstantina Katcheves from 百时美施贵宝 and Jodi Akin of Hawthorne Health, Inc. , our board, our speakers, and our participants.?

As we begin this day, I want to take a moment and reflect on where we are now. Because of the investments and innovations from many of the people in this room, we are seeing faster trials, more inclusive trials, and more accessible trials.

The companies you’ve invested in have accelerated timelines, advanced data collection, integration, and analytics, improved real world data collection, the adoption of synthetic control arms, longitudinal access to integrated information, complete trials in the home, streamlined regulatory and licensing, and made it easier to match patients to trials and do the last mile enrollment, and empower individuals with their complete, auto-syncing health data record.

These are big achievements, many of which, despite being around for years, were accelerated by the paradigm shift of risk during the onset of the pandemic. For a risk adverse industry, it suddenly became less risky to do something new, and more risky to adhere to the status quo. Sponsors, CROs, IRBs, health tech companies - we all advanced because we had no other choice. Remember the weekly FDA covid meetings where everyone shared learnings to move progress forward? Remember the break-neck pace that our colleagues at vaccine manufacturers kept up for months? The last decade, and particularly in the last few years, has seen a tremendous and meaningful evolution, a sustainable evolution, thanks to the investors and founders in this room.?

So what do the next ten years hold?

We are here today because we are change makers. We see a problem and our default setting is to find a solution. Our special gift is turning an idea into reality, as founders, as investors. So what is that reality that we will create together?

My question for today is simple - is what is our shared vision of the future that we will materialize together? How will we invest in technology and innovations that fundamentally change how research is done to make it faster, better, cheaper, more equitable, more integrated with care??What are the things that we can do today to lay the foundation for those changes of the next decade?

For starters, we can be more deliberately diverse. We all know the stats on the woefully small percent of funding that goes to women and underrepresented founders. What are we doing to measure and track how we are doing in our own portfolios?

We all know that the percent of women GPs is tiny, around 2%. What are we doing to change that in our own teams?

We know that clinical trial participants are heros, sharing their lives and data with the explicit knowledge that trials were not designed to benefit them, so what are we doing to support innovations that lighten their burden, to take away some of the friction of getting childcare, finding transportation, taking time off of work to advance research for the better good?

Do you know how you’re making research easier, better, more frictionless? This should be top of mind for all of us.

What are we doing to address the data gap from women not being required for NIH funded research till the policy change 1993? There is a significant gender data gap in our understanding of how diseases differently impact women, and how they respond to therapies.

These are things that each of us is this room are empowered to change. We are the doers; the creators. We make ideas a reality so that in coming years, that reality is downstairs at the main scope conference, widely improving how research is done, how research is integrated with care.

It’s on us. Not the next generation. We can do this now.

But we will be faster if we share a vision. And coming together for a meeting like this today is a great start. So take a second and look around. Look to your right, to your left, behind you and in front of you. These are the people, that perhaps out of the entire planet, are best equipped, best situated, to turn our vision of the future of clinical trials into a reality. And we will get it done.

For more information about this event, please see the agenda: https://www.scopesummit.com/partnering/program