Despite bringing about a whole bunch of troubles, challenges and contradictions, the COVID-19 pandemic did manage to cause a few positive things. In the case of research in the Life Sciences industry new approaches and technologies are now boosting cooperation in increasingly diverse areas. And everywhere innovation slowly but surely reshapes work all across the fields. Nonetheless, experts agree that those positive (no matter how contradictory it may sound) consequences of the coronavirus will require considerable effort to ensure they stick after the crisis is over (however that is defined). Though practices like remote monitoring and decentralized trials were thoroughly discussed before, it is the pandemic that accelerated putting these tools into practice, while keeping emphasis on patient safety. And remote work and recruiting as a whole have become dominant topics in Executive Search as well. So what should we keep from these troubled times?
Innovation=high priority
The pandemic urged to look for new innovative solutions that are worth keeping. Though at first some of the approaches were put into a drawer with a sticker “high risk”, lack of time and funding left no alternatives. Some of those have actually received more attention during the pandemic: master files (submissions about manufacturing processes and development platforms that can be used for multiple products), master protocols (which look at multiple treatments at once) and pragmatic trial design (trial in real-word conditions) – to name just a few.
