Research Works’ Mobile Trial Van Drives Off with WCG Innovation Award
A cargo van designed to serve as a fully functional mobile clinical trial site took the checkered flag as winner of this year’s WCG Innovation Challenge, presented last week at the 2024 MAGI Clinical Research Conference in New Orleans.
Three years after taking on irritable bowel syndrome trials in 2017 and encountering serious challenges in bringing participants to the site, Research Works, an integrated research organization also located in the Big Easy, began considering decentralization and virtual home visits as potential solutions.
Kaye Doiron, founder and CEO, came up with a bold and innovative idea that year: purchase a Mercedes Sprinter van and turn it into a comprehensive trial vehicle that serves “basically [as] an annex of the research site,” she told CenterWatch Weekly.
“The ‘hub and spoke’ model for us is a failing model alone. It’s exponentially costly to build and a beast of a burden to manage,” Doiron told conference attendees. “[Our van] brings the clinical trial site directly to the patient at home, as a standup pop-up site or seamlessly integrated into medical practice.”
“It depends on the target population you’re going after and how creative you want to be with your marketing scheme,” Doiron said. “We recently ran an STD study and it was a huge impact to be able to go park on Sorority Row or a college campus to get young people to come and read about our study.”
The van serves as a full pharmacy and laboratory on wheels, equipped with everything Research Works needs to conduct trials: a refrigerator and medical freezers; an ambient cabinet; an intravenous infusion chair and accompanying cardiac equipment; rescue equipment; and an EKG machine.
Its mobility gives it prime access to community happenings, such as church gatherings, festivals, concerts and university events, among many others. When not on the road, it plugs into Research Works’ home base to serve as an extra room. The hybrid-engine vehicle runs up to 40 hours idling, 12 to 14 hours on battery backup and nonstop when plugged into a standard wall outlet
Doiron’s innovation didn’t come together overnight. Designing the mobile trial van was a challenging endeavor, particularly when it came to the tighter confines of the van and the power needed to run all the trial equipment. Months of working with an engineering team were necessary to make her vision a sufficiently powered reality.
“Space was a big issue to really design a space where I can do an IV, manage cardiac responses, push rescue meds, get my staff around the chair to do chest compressions and defib. There was a lot of work that went into designing that space,” Doiron pointed out. “The other [issue] was the power — getting the hybrid engine to be able to run a 70-below refrigerator, a 20-below refrigerator and an ambient cabinet. We don’t ever turn this unit off.”
It wasn’t cheap, either, with the bill equaling approximately three brick-and-mortar satellite sites with lab and pharmacy capabilities — nearly $195,000. But the payoff has been massive, Doiron says, and she urges those interested in crafting their own trial van not to be deterred by the initial costs. A comparator study conducted with three satellite sites, for example, showed that Research Works’ mobile van boosted their patient database by 900 percent, and use of the van in a high-volume vaccine trial saw more than double the number of total consents compared to the traditional site.
“It is reliable, profitable, replicable and fully customizable for your sponsors’ needs,” she said. “As just an owner/founder with no outside capital, it took me four years to actualize it and realize it, but I was so motivated to get it built because I do feel it has limitless potential in many, many applications, not just conducting clinical trial research visits.”
To listen to recordings of MAGI 2024 sessions, click here.
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