Nuria Coll Bastus: Pioneering Innovation in Clinical Trials

Category: Cover Story

The landscape of modern business is often sculpted by the vision and drive of its leaders. These leaders chart the course for their organizations and inspire innovation and transformation within their sectors. Their strategic acumen sets them apart, making them pivotal industry figures. With an uncanny ability to foresee market trends, they adapt to evolving challenges and leverage opportunities that propel their companies to new heights. Moreover, they cultivate cultures of success where creativity and efficiency thrive, ensuring their enterprises not only navigate the complexities of the global market but lead the way in innovation and growth.

Among such distinguished ranks stands Nuria Coll Bastus, the Founder of Clinical Net Ltd, a UK health-tech startup. Nuria’s foresight and innovative approach to healthcare technology made her a beacon in the industry. With a background deeply rooted in academic research and drug development, her transition to spearheading efforts at Clinical Net showcases a profound understanding of the healthcare sector’s scientific and operational demands. By matching and connecting people with the most suitable clinical trials within 5 minutes, the company ensures active engagement and empowers individuals to explore innovative healthcare opportunities.

Transforming Clinical Trials

Nuria Coll Bastus, driven by her firsthand experiences in the pharmaceutical industry, sought to revolutionize the landscape of clinical trials. With a background in oncogenomics and drug development, she witnessed the persistent challenge of delayed trials due to participant recruitment woes. Families desperate for treatment options for their loved ones battling cancer struggled to find suitable trials, highlighting a crucial disconnect between patients and available options.

Despite numerous attempts by the pharmaceutical industry to address clinical trials recruitment challenges, the problem persisted and significantly impacted them financially. Conversations with oncologists revealed a crucial gap: a lack of easily accessible information about available trials. Recognizing the need for a comprehensive solution, Nuria Coll Bastus envisioned a platform accessible to all stakeholders, allowing both healthcare professionals and patients to quickly find and connect to suitable clinical trials.

Nuria Coll Bastus’s dedication led her to craft a compelling business case, initially as her MBA case study. Serendipitously, an investor acquaintance took interest in her vision, providing the necessary financial backing. With this support, Nuria took the leap, leaving her pharmaceutical job to build the envisioned platform. Hence, with Nuria at the helm, Clinical Net was established, pioneering efforts to bridge the gap between patients and clinical trials.

Clinical Net draws upon over 12 years of experience in academic research and drug development in oncology. The company is pioneering a centralized clinical trial platform to address the limitations and inefficiencies in current clinical trial processes. At the core of Clinical Net’s mission is the commitment to democratizing access to clinical trials and transforming the traditional paradigm of clinical drug development. Through a centralized platform and an orchestrated suite of solutions, the company seeks to expedite the availability of groundbreaking therapeutic options to patients worldwide.

Overcoming Challenges

Before founding Clinical Net, Nuria Coll Bastus pondered why no one had developed a platform allowing users to swiftly find suitable clinical trials. However, delving into the complexities of building such a solution, she soon understood the daunting challenges. Despite publicly accessible information on clinical trials’ eligibility criteria, cleaning this data proved challenging. Each trial presented its criteria in varying formats, often lacking structure or standardization. Even state-of-the-art AI algorithms at the time struggled to parse this unstructured text effectively.

Initially, off-the-shelf solutions proved inadequate, capturing only a fraction of the necessary data. Nuria Coll Bastus’s solution involved developing specialized algorithms and strategically employing the most advanced large language models (LLMs). These models were integral to interpreting and structuring the vast amounts of unstructured trial data into a user-friendly format.

This breakthrough allowed Clinical Net to develop a user-friendly platform where individuals could answer personalized questions in lay language. These responses were then matched with suitable clinical trials, streamlining the process. Additionally, the platform facilitated direct communication between users and trial site teams, expediting the initiation of potential trial participation discussions.

Platform Innovation

Clinical Net’s platform seeks to enhance patient access to innovative treatments in clinical trials, boost trial recruitment and success rates, and significantly diminish the time and costs associated with drug development. By gathering and organizing complex clinical trial data from various sources, Clinical Net offers a comprehensive information pipeline that facilitates the digitalization and automation of clinical trial processes. In addition, by centralizing patient health information on a unified platform, it streamlines the recruitment of clinical trials and enhances efficiency in healthcare operations.

Strategic Innovation

A transformative moment for Clinical Net was realized with the strategic implementation of advanced LLMs to create an automated model for structuring clinical trial data. This innovation marked a significant turning point in the company’s growth. Faced with the challenge of managing an extensive database of clinical trials, the inefficiency of any manual data structuring approach became apparent. In contrast to its competitors who struggled with manual or semi-manual operations, Clinical Net’s adoption of an automated method distinguished them, facilitating efficient data handling and enabling scalability to new heights.

Clinical Net streamlines the process of accessing clinical trials, offering a user-friendly platform where individuals can find and connect with the most relevant trials in under five minutes. The platform’s Match section lists over 73,000 open clinical trials worldwide, serving patients, healthcare professionals, clinical trial teams, and sponsors. It opens doors to innovative treatments and boosts trial recruitment efforts. Furthermore, the Explore section aggregates information on more than 480,000 past and present clinical trials globally into a singular hub, making it an invaluable resource for those seeking comprehensive trial data.

Leading with Purpose

Nuria Coll Bastus advocates a leadership philosophy centered on focus and resilience. While acknowledging the investors’ expectations for returns, she emphasizes that the core mission is to improve healthcare and people’s lives, not solely driven by financial gains. Nuria underscores the importance of remaining composed amidst the inevitable challenges of startup life. She instills in her team the belief that surrendering is not an option, particularly during challenging periods when doubt may arise.

Maintaining a calm demeanor during turbulent times is paramount for Nuria Coll Bastus. By projecting composure, she helps assuage any apprehensions within the team, fostering a collective sense of confidence and determination. Nuria reinforces the significance of their work by sharing positive feedback from patients and their families, reminding the team of their profound impact. This consistent reminder of the organization’s purpose serves as a guiding beacon, ensuring that every member remains aligned with the overarching mission.

Mapping the Future

In charting the trajectory of Clinical Net over the next 5 to 10 years, Nuria Coll Bastus outlines ambitious plans to enhance the platform’s reach and functionality. Presently available in English, the immediate goal is global expansion, with plans to translate the platform into multiple languages. This initiative aims to facilitate worldwide access to clinical trials.

Beyond linguistic expansion, Nuria Coll Bastus envisions optimizing all facets of the clinical trial process. While the current focus lies on recruitment, recognizing it as the primary bottleneck, the long-term objective encompasses streamlining the clinical trial lifecycle. This includes expediting the selection and opening of trial sites, enhancing patient management and data collection processes, and refining data analysis methodologies.

A pivotal aspect of Clinical Net’s future roadmap involves contributing to establishing a global repository of anonymized patient data. This repository, accessible for open-source analysis, holds the potential to revolutionize treatment development by enabling in-silico clinical trials and epidemiology studies to accelerate healthcare. Nuria Coll Bastus envisions Clinical Net’s role in aggregating and disseminating this data, fostering collaboration and innovation within the pharmaceutical industry. While realizing these long-term goals may seem distant, Nuria remains steadfast in her commitment to advancing Clinical Net’s mission.

Successful Launch

Nuria Coll Bastus recounts a recent triumph in the form of the platform’s successful launch in 2023. The unveiling targeted the lung cancer community, engaging patients, advocacy groups, medical professionals, and pharmaceutical entities specializing in lung cancer programs. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with stakeholders lauding the platform as a long-awaited solution to clinical trial challenges. Since then, Clinical Net has expanded its reach to encompass not only all oncology conditions but also all diseases and medical conditions.

The company’s commitment to continuous improvement and user-centric innovation was central to the launch’s success. Throughout the development process, Nuria Coll Bastus and her team maintained open lines of communication with key stakeholders, actively soliciting feedback to refine the platform’s functionality.

Testimonials

“We have been waiting for this. This is a fantastic platform that will help many patients!”
Patient advocate

“Such an important platform to share as widely and as loudly as possible to help patients, their families and medics, and those running the trials who often struggle to recruit to them.”
Patient advocate

“Clinical Net is a unique solution that offers a succinct and tailored source for clinical trials information. The intuitive interface of Clinical Net and the clarity that it offers along the user journey make it a very efficient tool to gain insights with a clear vision of the clinical drug development industry and the user needs.”
Senior Medical Advisor

“Clinical Net is an amazing solution to help patient recruitment. There is no other platform that can do what Clinical Net does. Any other solution out there is not as good as this one is.”
Clinical Trials Operation Head

“I am delighted to support Clinical Net because of its vision and distinction in addressing key unmet needs of patients, health services, and pharmaceutical industry in clinical trial recruitment for all diseases, globally. Through innovative technology and exclusive, real time databases, patients, healthcare providers, and charities have user friendly access to accessible and relevant clinical trial information, tailored to the individual. For trial sponsors and investigators the rate of clinical trial recruitment, so often a reason for trial failure, is enhanced significantly by Clinical Net in an ethical, GDPR-compliant, and cost-effective way through identification of eligible, interested, trial participants.”
Professor of Cancer Medicine