Mohammed Ali of Medable: “Reapplying learnings to spark change and achieve scalability”

“The COVID-19 pandemic provided new impetus for creativity in clinical research, following several decades with little major disruption,” says Mohammed Ali, Chief Domain Expert at Medable. “Now we need to persevere to build on this momentum and move forward, applying pandemic learnings to create sustainable approaches.”

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What was your background prior to this role, and how did it prepare you for the work you do now? I learned a lot of the key qualities of being a CEO from team sports and my experience conducting research at Stanford. It was the perfect combination that directly applies to leading the team at Medable, with a strong focus on our mission to get effective therapies to patients faster, plus the relentless drive and working as a team to reach our goals.

As the industry moves from a study-by-study DCT implementation approach to a scalable enterprise-wide digital model, DCTs will help drive cycle time reduction and cost efficiencies while supporting the identification of life-changing new compounds.

Today we released our first-ever awards list featuring “The Top 35 Digital Health Leaders.” This annual list highlights 35 of the most innovative and influential leaders in the digital health industry. The list was compiled after an extensive internal and external research process that spanned over six months. Key factors considered for the honorees included their impact on the industry, outsider conversations, funding, partnerships signed, customers signed, experience, role, and the “it” factor.

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"It takes 12 years and $2.6 billion to bring a drug to market," said Michelle Longmire, MD, CEO at Medable. The company has raised over $500 million to improve the clinical trial process and achieved unicorn status in 2021.

As the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gets serious about requiring diversity plans for clinical trials, and as the use of decentralized clinical trial (DCT) designs increases the appeal of study participation for patients, expert contributors to the forthcoming February 2023 issue of ACRP’s Clinical Researcher journal caution that careful planning for patient retention efforts are still necessary to reap the benefits of these trends.

The Nova Scotia Health Innovation Hub has selected Medable’s decentralised clinical trial (DCT) platform to improve care accessibility for remote oncology patients in rural Nova Scotia, Canada.

This partnership aims to enhance patient access and trial diversity across the country.

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The company will set up a clinical trial site network alongside sponsors, CROs, and health systems, for colorectal cancer and immune health.

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Robert Califf, FDA commissioner, has called for major reform of the clinical research enterprise to reduce health disparities between scientific advancement and actual U.S. life expectancy.

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Medable has announced a collaboration with non-profit Every Cure for conducting global, remote clinical trials for drug repurposing candidates. Every Cure was officially launched, in collaboration with the Clinton Global Initiative, in September to scale up a new ‘drug repurposing’ research approach for identifying rare disease treatments. Under the partnership, Medable will provide specialised software and services for the international, remote clinical trials.

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