Acurian, Inc., a leading, full service provider of patient recruitment and retention solutions, announced at the patient recruitment & retention for diabetes & obesity studies conference in Amsterdam that it recently completed its enrolment contribution of over 600 diabetes patients for a global, nine-protocol diabetes study.

According to Roger Smith, Acurian’s senior vice president of operations, the programme started in 2010 and is the company’s largest diabetes project to date. Acurian’s patient contribution represented over 30% of the total enrolment goal, and was additive to the number of patients sourced by the participating research sites’ own practices. Through its patient contribution, Acurian reduced the enrolment timeline by 11 weeks on average across the nine protocols. For one protocol, the sponsor realized a seven-month time savings had it relied only on site-based enrolment.

“We have a very rich history with regard to supporting diabetes clinical studies,” stated Smith. “This programme, however, truly showcases our ability to provide significant, additive patient enrolments to accelerate trial timelines. This is particularly noteworthy in diabetes, a therapeutic area with increasingly nuanced protocols and fierce competition for clinical trial participants.” Smith stated that Acurian generated over 20,000 pre-qualified referrals through direct mail to regional subsets of its database of over eight million diabetes patients, along with advertising within traditional online and social networks deployed internationally. Acurian’s patient database houses over half of the diagnosed type 2 diabetics in the United States.

“Finding and enrolling qualified diabetes patients will continue to be a challenge for sponsors and sites, despite the growing incidence and prevalence of the disease,” indicated Smith. “This is particularly true in the United States, but we are well positioned to help sponsors recruit, enrol and retain diabetes patients in all corners of the globe.”

Acurian is a leading full-service provider of clinical trial patient recruitment and retention solutions for the life sciences industry. Through its proprietary patient panel of over 65 million patients, centralized advertising capabilities, and a fully hosted enrolment management technology platform, Acurian is able to identify, contact, pre-screen, and refer patients into clinical trials, all while supporting investigator sites with services to maximize the randomization potential of every referred patient.