Natural language processing is becoming ever more important in research. The explosion in interest in LLMs is sparking many opportunities to analyse text data in healthcare, social sciences, and other areas.
We’re proud to announce that the Clinical Trial Risk Tool has been selected as a winner of the Plotly Dash Example Apps Challenge (2023), out of 25 amazing apps submitted by the community.
Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, this app uses natural language processing, Plotly Dash, and the spaCy and Scikit-Learn libraries to calculate the risk of a clinical trial failing to deliver informative results. It reads the trial protocol and identifies key features from the text which are fed into a risk model.
Join Plotly’s webinar to see the tool in action! https://tinyurl.com/4zd3emkr
You can try the new version of the app at: https://clinicaltrialrisk.org/tool
You can try version 1.0 of the app (using Plotly Dash) at: https://clinicaltrialrisk.org/tool/login?guest=true/.
Wood TA and McNair D. Clinical Trial Risk Tool: software application using natural language processing to identify the risk of trial uninformativeness. Gates Open Res 2023, 7:56 (https://doi.org/10.12688/gatesopenres.14416.1).
A number of documents are needed to produce a complete and accurate clinical trial budget. The necessary documents typically include: the study protocol (generally the most important document for building a budget) the informed consent form the clinical trial agreement or sponsor contract any laboratory and pharmacy manuals the charge master or schedule of fees the sponsor’s budget. However, sometimes a sponsor will send only the synopsis to a CRO when requesting a quote.
Are you wondering how you can build a detailed clinical trial budget from the protocol, whether for a site, CRO, or sponsor? This may appear an intimidating task. You have to read the protocol carefully, find the schedule of events, calculate how many times each activity occurs during the trial, and slowly create an itemised budget spreadsheet. There are cost items buried in footnotes that you need to look for.
Guest post by Youssef Soliman, medical student at Assiut University and biostatistician In 2025, the outsourcing of clinical trials has become a common strategy for pharmaceutical and biotechnology sponsors. Facing rising R&D costs and complicated studies, sponsors turn to Contract Research Organizations (CROs) and other external partners to manage clinical trials. This practice, known as outsourcing clinical trials, is adopted as a best practice for containing costs and enhancing efficiency in drug development [1].
