Manny Lazaro | Jounce Therapeutics, Inc.
Clinical Operations
Manny Lazaro, VP, Head of Clinical Operations, Jounce Therapeutics
Lazaro: At Jounce Therapeutics, we are a new biotech company and I have the opportunity of building the department from scratch. So with that, there were no systems and no tools in order to manage our clinical studies. Quickly I found that the team was using manually processes (excel and other word documents) to track a lot of the information to oversee the clinical trials. I knew that approach wasn’t sustainable, and I was aware of the elluminate platform from eClinical Solutions and reached out that group and have been working with them for the last couple years.
So Jounce Therapeutics is an immunotherapy company focused on finding cures for cancer. With the clinical trials there’s a lot of sample collection and a need that I discovered right away is the need to have and track samples in real time, and knowing the components of elluminate, I knew the system could handle such tracking of the thousands of samples we process on a daily basis.
I presented the problem to eClinical Solutions and they were able to build and customize an application for tracking the samples in real time. At Jounce Therapeutics we use an outsourced model, and therefore samples are being transferred from the site from one vendor to another vendor. Our ability to now track samples as they’re being handed off from one vendor to the next and then eventually back to Jounce Therapeutics has been very useful in helping us make these real time decisions.
The experience with eClinical Solutions has been outstanding. From the initial project assignment we were given a very experienced project manager who helped guide the team through the specifications and through the build process, the testing process, and through implementation. That’s been very seamless and the team from eClinical Solutions has been very supportive in helping us become proficient in the platform.
What makes eClinical Solutions unique is the team has the expertise in clinical research, clinical development, and clinical operations. Coupling that with knowledge and innovation they’ve been able to put an offering together that is practical and useful for the users out there. Their approach has been really listening to the customer, understanding what their needs are, and not forcing something that isn’t necessary or applicable. From the beginning as we presented our problems and our needs to the team, quickly the team at eClinical Solutions put together some solutions that fit our needs.