Gwyn Bebb:
In oncology, we see an awful lot of innovation coming down the pipeline, bringing new assets across every indication. As a result, we're seeing an extension of people's lives and improvements in quality of life in cases where we would not have anticipated people surviving more than a year when I was in practice. So when you combine all of these things, there's a lot of exciting things happening, and Parexel is perfectly placed to help move these things forward even faster than we would've otherwise been able to do.
So in terms of how our recent work has had great impact for clients, I would cite two examples. The first was into the radiopharmaceutical space where we were able to reassure the clients that we had the expertise, not just to run and design the phase one trial itself, but to handle the radiopharmaceutical in a capable and safe way.
Our ability to show that we could combine resources, to make sure that the patient pathway was slick, that there was a guarantee that the patient would be treated safely at the right time in the right place with the radiopharmaceutical was extremely reassuring. That came about because of previous experience in this field, our experts in logistics and a fantastically collaborative team to show the clients that that responsibility could safely be handled by us, thereby taking a big weight off their shoulders.
The second was in the non-small cell lung cancer space, where a client was running a trial with a very novel combination and a series of adverse events, and even deaths had appeared in a clinical trial. This was, of course, was very concerning. Now our ability to dig into the story of each patient, to find the factors that might have led to this to create the narrative and understand the causality and the relationship of these adverse events and deaths to the investigative compound was extremely reassuring to the client and pointed to the fact that this trial was still safe and that the assets should still move forward.
This in particular, was very satisfying to me because I think this combination is extremely promising, and seeing it fall at a hurdle unnecessarily would've been a great shame. Now we're in the position of being able to see this asset continue to move forward with more patients being given the opportunity to benefit.
