Decentralized Clinical Trials in Oncology: What benefits do they provide?

by Pedro Vergara, February 5, 2025

Clinical research is one of the fundamental pillars of medicine that enables us to better understand diseases and to develop safe and effective therapies for their treatment, among other benefits. Innovation and technology are providing high value in this area of development, enabling an evolution toward more sophisticated and efficient models, with which we are able to obtain high quality clinical evidence. This is the case with Decentralized Clinical Trials (DCT).

Decentralized Clinical Trials are differentiated from traditional ones in that the patients can participate without having to be present in person at the hospital or research institution. In this case, the monitoring throughout the trial, as well as the necessary testing, is carried out remotely, and the data are gathered through a series of questionnaires to which the patient responds and/or through connected devices.

In this context, technology and Digital Health platforms play a key role, as they can be used as tools for the development and capture of information, thanks to their ability to collect data in real time (those reported by the patient as well as data from sensors and wearables), and to monitor the patient remotely.

As we previously saw in our article “¿Qué es un Estudio Clínico Descentralizado y qué ventajas ofrece?”, DCTs offer a variety of advantages and benefits:

- They enable the researcher to recruit more patients and to generate a more heterogeneous sample, which improve the quality of the trial.
- They increase patient retention, at a level 95% higher than in traditional clinical trials, according to recent data.
- They improve accessibility for patients by avoiding unnecessary travel. Data shows that almost 70% of potential participants live more than two hours away from the research center.
- They enable remote monitoring of the patient.

This is contributing to the increase in the use of digital tools in clinical trials, which was encouraged in the recent publication of the “Guía para la realización de elementos descentralizados en ensayos clínicos” de la AEMPS”, published by the Spanish Agency of Medicines and Medical Devices. The goal is to implement these trials, ensuring their appropriate operation.

If we focus on research in oncology, Decentralized Clinical Trials offer significant potential as, in addition to boosting access for oncology patients who otherwise would not be able to benefit from them, they facilitate continuous remote monitoring, assuring the supervision that is needed in this disease. Furthermore, because results and evidence are obtained without the need for the patient to be present in the medical center, unnecessary travel and exposure are avoided, as well as waiting time. This, in turn, reduces costs (in time and money) for the patients and their family members, and improves their quality of life, a very important aspect of this disease.

Additionally, thanks to how data are collected from these studies, the disease can be understood outside of the hospital environment, providing valuable information about how patients and their families behave during the time between hospital visits. In a disease like cancer, where the adverse effects can appear days after the application of treatment, the ability of DCTs to capture these events with precision, and reduce the probability of loss of data, enables the trials to generate robust, quality data. Thanks to this kind of clinical trial and the collection of data throughout the cycle and not only during patient visits, the management of the disease is improved, as there is a more complete patient-centered view.

As we have seen, the use of technology favors the implementation of Decentralized Clinical Trials, and allows for a more complete view of the patient, breaking down some obstacles that are found in traditional clinical trials. This encourages the implementation of a greater number of these trials which, in their turn, will provide access to a greater number of patients, obtaining robust clinical evidence in an optimized way. With the growing use of technology in healthcare, and the innovations that are arriving on the scene, we can say that the implementation of this type of trial will increase, becoming part of medicine now and in the future.