THREAD Scales Decentralized Clinical Trials Across 60 Countries Using AWS

Clinical research technology company THREAD provides a fully configurable platform for running decentralized clinical trials (DCTs) and patient-centric electronic clinical outcome assessment (eCOA) solutions. It also provides consulting services that offer global scalability and rapid flexibility from clinical research design to close out. THREAD's solution helps pharmaceutical companies and clinical research organizations (CROs) design studies that are modern, more inclusive, and retain more participants thus improving sponsors’ ability to achieve research objectives. To deliver on that promise, THREAD needed a scalable, reliable hosting infrastructure that could also achieve the country-specific regulatory requirements across its global operations.

Using Amazon Web Services (AWS), THREAD has scaled its platform across 60 countries to meet the heightened demand for patient-centric DCTs and eCOA solutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. By making an early investment in cloud technologies, THREAD can innovate and offer more inclusive and cost-effective solutions compared with traditional clinical trials, which are more complex and expensive.

Through its engagement with AWS Professional Services, THREAD learned about the AWS Well-Architected Tool, which helps companies review their architecture and adopt AWS best practices. Using this resource, THREAD focused on future-proofing its environment and optimizing its architecture with data security and regulatory compliance in mind. “The AWS Well-Architected Tool helped us better understand our current infrastructure and how we could achieve our goals in the fastest, most efficient way possible by aligning with AWS best practices,” says Pearson.

Part of THREAD’s unique approach is unifying disparate trial datasets into one central hub that offers streamlined access and powers advanced analytics. THREAD stores its data using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. The company set up its platform to automatically store multimodal data collected from trial participants, ranging from telehealth visit summaries to data from wearables, in Amazon S3. “We’re reducing the time our customers need to spend on data collection and data quality,” says John Reites, chief executive officer (CEO) of THREAD. “We’ve changed where the source data comes from so that we capture data directly from participants’ devices or from the person who inputs it. This allows THREAD’s customers to direct more resources toward high-level tasks that accelerate time to market, verus focusing on low quality, manual efforts.”

As THREAD continues to expand, it plans to continue working alongside AWS to optimize its architecture. “Working on AWS means that we can customize our services and build out more tools on top of our infrastructure,” says Pearson. “We can operate at scale and give our customers peace of mind that they have a reliable, secure environment where they can run clinical trials and test new medications.”