Medical Research Network (MRN) is an organisation that specialises in the conduct of clinical trial visits in the patient’s home and supporting clinical trial sites with nursing resources. MRN aims to make clinical trials more efficient for both the patients and researchers. They specialize in COMPLEX home trial support – specifically IMP administration, pediatric clinical trials, global clinical studies and rare disease populations.
MRN’s nursing services are designed to ease the burdens of today’s clinical trial environment for both patients and sites, therefore accelerating patient recruitment and retention and maximizing the impact of the trial for the pharmaceutical sponsor. The organisation is based in the UK with offices in both the US and Madrid, but has worked on clinical trials in over forty countries, the highest number of any provider.
One of the areas the organisation specialises in is supporting clinical trials for orphan drugs and treatments for rare diseases. This is an area of particular need, given that there are over 7,000 different rare diseases but less than 400 FDA approved treatments. It can also be difficult to carry out these studies due to the often-invasive nature of the treatments, and recruitment challenges linked to the limited size of the patient communities.
MRN aims to minimise these problems by replacing a number of protocol defined visits, which would normally take place onsite, by relocating them in the patient’s home rather than asking the patients to travel to the clinical site. This can reduce travel time, costs, and difficulties for those participating. It can also benefit the clinical study because patients are likely to find it easier to sign up to and continue with the program due to the reduced burden and travel-related inconvenience.
According to the MRN website, Home Trial Support visits can increase patient recruitment by 60% or more and typically maintains retention of patients at over 95%. MRN’s Home Trial Support service also reduces the number of patients going to the clinical site, which often means that the study can recruit more volunteers or carry out more trials, due to a reduced burden on the site team.
MRN has worked on over fifty rare disease clinical trials, and has carried out over 18,000 home visits. The conditions studied include Gaucher disease, Fabry disease, haemophilia B, and Duchenne muscular dystrophy, amongst others. In total, the MRN has treated over 1,300 rare disease patients.
For more information about their work, visit Medical Research Network’s website.
All the statistics used in this article were sourced from MRN.
