07/24/2026  |  GlobalData Healthcare  |  Clinical Trials Arena

https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/analyst-comment/china-rapid-rise-drug-development-us-oncology/ 

China is rapidly overtaking the US in global oncology clinical trials, accounting for more than half of late-stage study activity by 2025.

2026 marks a clear turning point for China’s position in the global clinical trials arena, particularly in oncology. At this year’s American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting, Chinese sponsors achieved record visibility, with over 90 oncology studies from Hengrui Pharma alone, alongside oral and late-breaking sessions that drew attention from multinational pharma and investors.

The US and Europe have long dominated ASCO participation; however, the pace and scale of China’s involvement are now reshaping the event’s landscape.
China’s role in global oncology clinical research has expanded dramatically. According to GlobalData’s Clinical Trials Intelligence, China was responsible for 25% of global oncology trials with a start date in 2016, rising to 31% by 2018. By 2025, this share surged to 55%, with a preliminary figure of 41.8% in 2026 as ongoing studies are counted. In contrast, the US, which represented 27% of global oncology trials in 2016 and 26% in 2018, declined to 14% by 2025 and 20% in 2026. These patterns underscore China’s rise in oncology trials, while the US has seen plateauing or decreasing activity.

This expansion isn’t limited to sheer volume. Chinese companies and academic centres are increasingly driving later-phase and multi-centre trials, moving beyond the domestic market to sponsor or participate in multinational studies. Leading names such as Sun Yat-sen University and Fudan University now rank among…

07/24/2026  |  Maggie Fick  |  Euronext Markets

https://live.euronext.com/en/financial-news/astrazeneca-magic-faces-rare-test-after-trial-failure-share-slide 

AstraZeneca's long-time CEO Pascal Soriot has rarely put a foot wrong. The company's shares have more that quadrupled in price during his 14-year tenure, soaring above the wider FTSE 100 index and main British rival GSK.

AstraZeneca's huge diversity and number of drugs on the market and success in clinical trials in different therapeutic areas set it apart from peers, giving Soriot the golden touch in the eyes of investors.

Now, though, investors have some cause for concern after news this month of the unexpected failure of nerve drug Wainua in a late-stage heart disease trial, which hammered the shares and turned attention on the firm's drug R&D pipeline.

AstraZeneca's shares are down 10% this year and trail GSK and the wider London stock index over two years, with attention now on two other late-stage trials that could shape confidence in AstraZeneca's research engine and long-term growth outlook.

When it releases second-quarter earnings on Monday, analysts and investors say they will be focusing less on the numbers and more on what executives say about the outlook for breast cancer study SERENA-4 and lung cancer trial AVANZAR - seen now as key.

Three sequential trial failures this year would start to raise questions about whether AstraZeneca's R&D success story is starting to falter, analysts say.

HSBC analyst Rajesh Kumar has already downgraded his rating from buy to hold after AstraZeneca reported the Wainua trial failure on July 9.

"Fundamentally, do I like AstraZeneca's R&D strategy, engine, company? Yes I do," Kumar said. "Do I feel…

07/24/2026  |  By Tamieka Welsh  |  Black Doctor

https://blackdoctor.com/inclusive-clinical-trials-disabilities/ 

According to the National Council on Disability, approximately 61 million U.S. adults — or about one in four Americans — live with a disability. Despite representing a significant portion of the population, people with disabilities have historically been underrepresented in clinical trials. 

The lack of representation can limit researchers’ understanding of how new treatments, therapies, and medical devices perform across diverse patient populations. Although researchers and healthcare organizations have made progress toward creating more inclusive studies, barriers to participation remain. 

BlackDoctor spoke with Joyce H.N Nortey, MPH, MSBH, Sr. Director of Clinical Research & Operations at Evidation Health and Research Advisor for the Fibroid Foundation, about why disability inclusion matters and what researchers can do to make clinical trials more accessible. 

Why Including People with Disabilities In Clinical Trials Can Advance Research 
Clinical trials are designed to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of new medications, medical devices, and treatment approaches before they become widely available. To generate meaningful findings, study participants should reflect the diversity of the people who may eventually use those treatments. 

When people with disabilities are excluded from clinical trials, researchers may have limited information about how treatments, medications, and medical devices perform across different  physical, sensory, intellectual, or developmental disabilities. As a result, this can leave healthcare providers with less data to guide treatment decisions and may lead them to overlook differences in treatment effectiveness,…

07/23/2026  |  Marianne Kolbasuk McGee   |  Bank Info Security

https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/how-purpose-built-ai-speed-up-clinical-trials-a-32312 

Amber Hill, CEO of Research Grid, on Safely Overcoming Clinical Trial Bottlenecks

Clinical trial teams lose time to patient sourcing, site selection, manual data entry and other back-office tasks. But purpose-built artificial intelligence tools can automate administrative work, improve data quality and help promising treatments reach patients faster, said Amber Hill, founder and CEO of Research Grid.

Safe clinical AI requires purpose-built models, full traceability and checkpoints that keep humans in the loop. Research Grid, which provides AI-powered automation tools, develops its models in house to address specific clinical trial bottlenecks, rather than trying to "retrofit" or put a "wrapper" around more generalized AI, such as OpenAI models, she said.

Its systems also check patient anonymization, missing answers and inconsistent data before auditors review the results.

"Something that would take six months to a year for a research team to accomplish, we can do it in a matter of seconds," Hill said.

Research Grid applies natural language processing, optical character recognition, computer vision and large language models across the end-to-end clinical trial life cycle. Its tools and services support site feasibility, patient sourcing, data capture and study closeout, she said.

"Oftentimes these are small research clinical trial teams that have quite a huge load on them, and they are manually or via tablet, putting in very critical information and data from patients," she said.

"Each thing needs to be connected, in a way that it's not currently in legacy systems.…

07/23/2026  |  Bree Foster  |  DDN/Drug Discovery News

https://www.drugdiscoverynews.com/can-virtual-patients-predict-whether-a-drug-will-succeed-17347 

Phase Advance is using mechanistic virtual patient models to predict how LEAF4Life's hypoxia-targeting therapy could perform across multiple indications.

Even after years of laboratory research and early clinical testing, most drug candidates fail before reaching patients. Recent advances in AI and computational drug development have yet to change that reality, with the percentage of Phase 2 and 3 trials terminated before completion more than doubling from 11 percent to 23 percent between 2013 and 2023.

While many failures arise from a lack of drug efficacy or issues with safety, fundamental flaws in clinical trial design can also significantly hinder success. Inappropriate patient selection, poorly chosen endpoints, and incorrect dose selection can all undermine a study before it begins. Current modeling approaches are largely retrospective tools, helping researchers understand how a drug behaves in the body or why a clinical study succeeded or failed.

Phase Advance is taking a different approach. Rather than using computational models to interpret existing clinical data, the company is attempting to simulate the clinical trial itself using virtual patients. The company is now applying its platform to LEAF4Life's hypoxia-targeting therapy, KizaVie, across 16 therapeutic programs, including a basket trial spanning seven oncology indications. Using virtual patient populations, the platform aims to prioritize indications while informing dose selection, treatment schedules, biomarker strategies, patient selection, and broader clinical trial design.

A non-linear mathematical model
Drug development…