Emma Ogburn
Chief Clinical Officer
Patients could receive new drugs faster, thanks to a revolutionary new clinical trials system.
Too often, trial teams repeat work their organisation has already done. Disconnected processes, siloed teams and untraced decisions add delays before new treatments reach patients. Dr Emma Ogburn has seen firsthand that it doesn’t have to be this way.
She led the UK’s national urgent public health programme, delivering potential Covid-19 treatments to over 41,000 patients and reducing the clinical trial set-up to two weeks, all while complying with regulations. After the urgency of Covid-19 drug trials, Dr Ogburn has seen progress plateau, or even reverse, with processes slower than ever.
AI workspace
Dr Ogburn is now Chief Clinical Officer at Cori Clinical, which aims to harness AI to accelerate clinical trials and get treatments to patients faster. It is an AI workspace that pulls together everything an organisation has learned through their years of experience and combines it with the latest external intelligence from many sources such as regulators, data aggregators and trial registries.
She led the UK’s national urgent public health programme,
delivering potential Covid-19 treatments to over 41,000 patients
Using this evidence, the system helps teams identify risks, assess options and connect study design with budgets, timelines and operational plans. As a trial evolves, teams can understand the wider implications of changes and keep their plans aligned. Although the AI surfaces the risks, questions and creates the drafts, the teams make the decisions. “With Cori analysing and making intelligent recommendations from the latest regulatory guidance and trial submissions from the global regulators, including the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) and EMA (European Medicines Agency), it means the trials it creates are compliant by design,” Dr Ogburn adds. “And teams can make the right calls earlier and launch studies much more efficiently.” With clients already reporting cutting trial design and regulatory submissions from months to weeks.
Global tipping point
These advances come as global regulators are pushing for trials that are faster, more adaptive and built around real-time data. Although trial technology has changed little in the past two decades, recent progress in AI and large language models opens a compelling path forward in bringing greater efficiency to trials and ultimately delivering new medicines faster to patients who need them.
