Waterdrop debuts digital patient recruiting platform for clinical trials

Chinese insurance technology company Waterdrop Inc has officially debuted a digital clinical trial patient recruitment platform called "Yifan Recruitment", after trial operations for about half a year.

The patient recruiting platform has helped more than 10 leading pharmaceutical companies, such as Chia Tai Tianqing Pharmaceutical Group and Innovent, to recruit subjects for more than 60 new drug clinical trial projects in areas such as lung cancer, liver cancer, gynecological tumors and gastrointestinal tumors.

China's innovative medicine industry has been developing fast, due to facilitating policies and regulations, better access to capital investment, and the global shift of the pharmaceutical R&D outsourcing industrial chain in favor of China, which spurs the need for clinical trial patient recruitment.

However, recruiting patients traditionally relies on clinical trial research centers, and with the rapid growth of the number of clinical trial projects, those traditional channels cannot provide enough qualified subjects, especially with the impact of the pandemic. Some clinical studies have even been suspended due to failures in subject recruitment.

On the other hand, people's lack of sufficient and correct knowledge of clinical trials in China also leads to increased difficulties in recruiting suitable patients for clinical trial projects, which often results in unsatisfactory recruitment rates and affects the development of new drugs.

According to Yifan Recruitment, each year millions of patients with serious illnesses seek help from society on Waterdrop Inc's crowdfunding platform for people with severe diseases, because they cannot afford medical expenses, with more than one-third of the platform's users being cancer patients.

Some of the patients have developed resistance to drugs on market, or hope to try the latest therapies, but they cannot afford the high costs. Those patients often consult the crowdfunding platform on how to participate in clinical trial projects for new drugs to get free medication, it said, adding the launch of the recruiting platform aims to meet such needs.

Through the Yingfan Recruitment digital platform, patients can easily find the clinical trial projects that best match them. The system will recommend the most suitable clinical trials to patients based on massive data crunching, to improve recruitment efficiency, reduce trial costs, improve the quality of clinical trial projects, and accelerate the approval and listing process of new drugs, the company said.

In the past six months, more than 30,000 patients with severe diseases have sought help from Yifan Recruit, and more than 5,000 of them have been matched to suitable clinical trial projects.

The company has also established cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, contract research organizations and industry research firms, such as Roche, Covance and IQVIA.

As some data showed only about 30 percent of adult cancer patients in China are willing to participate clinical trials, due to lack of awareness and correct knowledge, the recruiting platform has also established partnerships with many leading clinical trial facilities in China, to provide patient education and clinical trial project information.