Green clinical trials: A sustainable case for decentralized digital clinical trials

Green clinical trials: A sustainable case for decentralized digital clinical trials

Digitalization has finally arrived in the heavily regulated field of clinical trials. Decentralized digital clinical trials (DDKT) are revolutionizing how evidence is generated for new medical treatments. Although DDKT is known to be faster, more cost-effective and accessible to more groups of people, there is still skepticism due to the supposed technical complexity. We were able to show a previously unexplored aspect of the digitization of clinical trials: energy and CO₂-Savings compared to traditional studies. We were able to show this in the renowned journal PLOS Digit Health 2 (10).

Traditional clinical trials use significant amounts of paper and energy for forms, questionnaires, visits to study sites, and monitoring visits. The complete digitization of a clinical trial results in a 90.1% reduction in CO compared to a traditional study₂emissions, which corresponds to around 4,399 kg CO2 — or a long-haul flight of 24,000 km (around Berlin — Australia back and forth) — and would require 237 trees to grow for a year to remove this CO₂-Balancing emissions.

The results of our study therefore make it imperative to consider sustainability even when planning and carrying out clinical trials. Depending on the study, complete digitization does not always make sense, but hybrid approaches offer a realistic solution when different degrees of decentralization and digitization are used. Our estimates show that switching to such approaches in around 15,000 clinical trials per year in Europe could potentially save between 41,009 and 65,981 tons of CO₂ would have. Given the EU's goal of becoming climate-neutral by 2050, regulators, politicians, funding agencies, healthcare companies and researchers should intensify joint efforts to safely make this environmentally friendly approach possible.

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