Top Stories of 2025: AI in Clinical Research, Pharmacy Recruitment, Pragmatic Trials
By Clinical Research News Staff
December 29, 2025 | In clinical research, AI was the hottest topic this year, with the Food & Drug Administration, big pharma, and researchers exploring ways generative AI can help with drug discovery, the clinical trials process, and the regulatory landscape. But clinical trials are still a personal venture, and other stories topped the list highlighting the person-to-person interaction necessary for trial success.
Read more for our list of the most-read articles of 2025.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is being used by AstraZeneca to expedite its five-year ambitions to be an $80 billion company, deliver 20 new medicines, and be carbon negative. The initial value-driving activities include the creation of AI assistants to help with 3D location detection on CT scans and facilitate knowledge extraction for clinical documents as well as an intelligent protocol tool built in partnership with medical writers, according to Vaishali Goyal, the company’s generative AI lead in the R&D IT group focused on the development portfolio. Read more.
Winners were named in the 2025 SCOPE Best of Show Awards yesterday. This year four winners were chosen by the SCOPE community—two veterans to the space and two companies new to SCOPE: Anju Software, Medidata, Biorce, and Phastar. Here are the winning new products in their own words. Read more.
A spinoff of global biotech company BeiGene is looking to transform the clinical development of oncology medicines with a software platform integrating all the features study sponsors and sites need to conduct trials and communicate with each other in a compliant way. The capabilities of its Front-end Interoperable Capture System (FICS), which notably includes the generation of regulatory-grade data at the point of care, are enabled by generative artificial intelligence (AI) and a growing list of partnerships with hospitals, health systems, oncology health networks, and community oncology practices the world over, says cofounder and Chief Operations Officer Bobby Reddy, M.D. Read more.
Walgreens ‘Built the Vessel’ for Making Clinical Trials a Care Option
In the span of three years, Walgreens—an integral part of communities across the U.S. for well over a century—has positioned itself as a key player in the clinical trial ecosystem highlighted by more than 35 biopharma partnerships and the engagement of over 17 million customers participating in industry-sponsored studies. The thesis that co-locating trials where patients are “actually works,” says Chief Biopharma Officer Ramita Tandon. The company’s clinical trials model is built around identifying and recruiting patients for trials, improving accessibility via 20 clinical trial sites housed within its community pharmacies, and understanding who and how to engage patients based on real-world evidence and analysis. “Community-centered clinical trials are absolutely pivotal to the future of clinical research,” says Tandon, “by building trust and broadening the scope and inclusivity of medical research.” Read more.
An artificial intelligence (AI) agent known as Grace is bringing clinical trials some much-needed speed and cost reduction and delivering more personalized, on-demand digital experiences for participants. Developed by fast-growing Grove AI, Grace has over the past year powered more than 50 phase 2 and 3 trials involving over 500,000 interactions with would-be and enrolled trial participants, shares company cofounder Sohit Gatiganti. The communications include phone calls, text messages, and emails to accomplish tasks such as screening participants and then making and reminding individuals about their on-site screening appointments. But Grace is not just another AI-powered call agent for automating patient recruitment and screening, he says. Grove’s AI Participant Relationship Management works “behind the scenes” to surface critical trial insights in real-time, enabling research teams to make data-driven actions on screening and enrollment. Read more.
Pragmatic trials, by name, have been around for well over a decade now and, while well intentioned, they remain poorly understood and currently offer a limited value proposition to study sponsors and contract research organizations (CROs), according to Drew Garty, chief technology officer, clinical data at Veeva Systems and a self-described “optimistic contrarian.” In his view, the ideal starting point is pragmatic innovation where the industry remains focused on simplifying and standardizing what happens in research for the benefit of all stakeholders, especially patients and study sites. Read more.
Contributed Commentary by Alimentiv | As gastrointestinal (GI) trials grow more sophisticated, the volume, velocity, and variety of study data have all expanded. One of the fastest-growing streams is electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePROs): diaries, symptom scores, quality-of-life surveys, and other instruments that come straight from the participant. Collecting this data quickly and conveniently is now mission critical. There is no one-size-fits-all template for ePRO deployment. Yet, particularly for small and mid-sized data teams, building ePROs inside the electronic data-capture (EDC) environment can strike the right balance of speed, cost, and control. That shift, however, requires a fresh look at who leads ePRO execution. For us, that leader is the Clinical Data Manager (CDM). Read more.
Contributed Commentary by PharmaLex | Regulators are tightening their scrutiny of the trial master file (TMF), placing the onus on companies to be ready for evaluation. Inspection-readiness should be embedded from the beginning, rather than a reaction to a notice of an inspection. In their metrics reports, inspectors are citing oversight of the TMF and sufficient documentation to demonstrate that oversight as priorities. To address any insufficiencies, companies are being urged to adopt a process-driven approach to how they manage the TMF and have buy-in from all stakeholders—both internal and external. Read more.
In case you were wondering, Jensen Huang’s favorite pre-trained generative AI models are ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini Pro: “These three models I use them interchangeably,” the founder and CEO of NVIDIA said today at a GTC presentation in Paris. But these models offer only some of the foundational capabilities that agentic AI offers businesses, he said. Today, IQVIA announced multiple AI orchestrator agents in collaboration with NVIDIA. These specialized agentic systems—covering trial start-up, target identification, clinical data review, and more—are designed to manage and accelerate drug development workflows for IQVIA customers. Today, Huang called it, “the world’s largest automation platform for clinical trials.” Read more.
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