How do you see advances in personalized medicine reshaping patient care, and what are the key challenges and opportunities ahead?

Diane Lacroix, Vice President – Clinical Data Management, eClinical Solutions

Personalized medicine carries immense potential for improved patient care in creating highly tailored therapies that are unique to an individual’s genetics and need, increasing accuracy while reducing harm. This precision approach could unlock better understanding of disease; help identify patient populations for smaller, faster trials; and even predict or prevent disease.  As developments in personalized medicine progress, realizing these outcomes open possibilities for enhanced engagement and trust with patients, helping achieve patient-centered research and care. Getting there depends on data — a lot of it — and holistic data insights. Personalized medicine relies on vast data sets from a variety of sources and systems, including omics data, labs and images, and data from wearables, sensors, and apps — along with traditional sources like electronic data capture (EDC) and electronic health records (EHR). To piece together a complete picture and drive decisions, these data must be integrated and interrogated for insights. Science and technology have advanced the potential for personalized medicine, but they’ve also increased the data complexity of modern clinical trials and contributed to fragmentation and silos. Operational challenges in data processing must be addressed in this data environment. Realizing the opportunity at hand requires addressing the data challenges of modern research. Robust data infrastructures need to enable interoperability, automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) — alongside processes adapted accordingly — so that teams can bring together and analyze these continuous streams of diverse data for the intelligence that drives personalized medicine, efficiently and at scale. 

Diane Lacroix

Vice President, Clinical Data Management, eClinical Solutions

Diane Lacroix is a data management professional and leader with over 20 years in the pharmaceutical/CRO industry. As VP, Clinical Data Management at eClinical Solutions, Diane is responsible for leading the data management function including building effective process and implementation strategies to ensure that clients receive maximum value and quality from the elluminate driven data services that Diane’s team delivers. Diane’s career in data management has included numerous leadership roles both at service providers and on the sponsor side. She has worked on all aspects of global trials from study start-up through to database closure and submission leading and managing successful teams and projects to ensure high quality and on-time delivery of clinical data assets. Diane has deep expertise in the oncology and rare disease therapeutic areas and in data management technologies including EDC (Electronic Data Capture) systems and integration and analytics technology platform like elluminate.