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DPHARM convened 1,000 professionals across the clinical trial landscape, focused on making clinical trials better, faster and more efficient, and delivering life-changing medicine and technologies to patients sooner. The event focused on real and impactful changes to meet the complexity of today’s clinical trials, by leveraging personnel, industry collaborations, innovations like AI and automation, and increasing simplicity where possible to bring more therapeutics to patients faster.
The 2025 keynotes brought insights and inspiration for the DPHARM audience.
The Patient Keynote, Victoria Gray, spoke about her experience as the first CRISPR gene therapy recipient for sickle cell disease, including her enrollment and participation in a clinical trial. Dr Scott Gottlieb, 23rd FDA Commissioner, helped the audience navigate the impacts of the geopolitical landscape on clinical research, including how the changes at FDA might affect the pace of drug development, progression into digital biomarkers, public health challenges, and more.
Ken Frazier, former Chairman and CEO of Merck & Co., Inc., shared how he led with integrity, his passion for tackling health inequities, and fostered a culture of innovation and cross-functional teamwork within his organization to promote stronger medicine development. Kenneth Getz, Director of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, gave the DPHARM audience new insights on optimizing the collection of protocol data, including opportunities to do so, strategies and practical approaches to simplify protocol design, and updated benchmarks on data collection practices.
High-level panel discussions focused on determining the right global footprint for clinical research; disrupting clinical operating models to deliver quality, efficiency and speed; and reversing increasing protocol complexity.
Technologists and service providers discussed the work they are doing for patient-centric clinical trial services, new frontiers in digital tech solutions, automating and accelerating clinical trials, and pushing the industry forward into the future of clinical trials.
Sponsors identified how they were advancing clinical trials through: deploying AI/GenAI/LLM to drive quality, safety and cost reduction; reducing protocol amendments; leveraging predictive analytics; E2E forecasting; next-gen EDC/CDMS platforms, EHR data; going ex-US with DCT adoption; and using patient insights, novel prescreening, change management, site adoption barriers, and strategies for digital biomarker adoption.
DPHARM Idol Disrupt returned with a new slate of highly vetted finalists who presented how they were developing a disruptive technology/service that could be a changing force for clinical trials. The winner, TrialHub, impressed the judges with their work automating standard-of-care research across 70+ countries to help sponsors design patient-aligned protocols, optimize site selection, and accelerate recruitment while reducing costly amendments.
We hope you enjoy this recap of the 15th annual DPHARM. The 16th annual DPHARM will be back in Boston, September 15-16, 2026.
