Two New Federal Efforts Designed to Accelerate Clinical Trials.

ARPA-H's SURPASS program aims to create faster, more cost-effective clinical trials with fewer participants, targeting improvements in trial design and regulation.

• Why it matters: Accelerating clinical trials can reduce costs and time to bring new treatments to patients, addressing inefficiencies in current trial processes.
• What they did: ARPA-H launched the SURPASS program seeking ideas from cross-disciplinary teams in statistics, AI, and clinical trial operations, while the FDA initiated a pilot pairing drug sponsors with research organizations for phase I trials.
• The result: These efforts may enable more efficient clinical trials, potentially shortening development timelines and lowering costs for new therapies.