There has been significant innovation in the way clinical trials are designed and conducted in recent times, with the mainstreaming of decentralised clinical trials just one of the many advances underway. The next level of innovation will come from the ability to combine clinical trial data with real word data (RWD). Previously encumbered by privacy concerns, and the risk of data being re-identified when combined, the ability to securely link data across the entire patient journey from trial to real world settings will unlock multiple benefits for drug development - from enabling longitudinal drug safety studies to informing trial design with a previously unattainable granularity of patient-level data. 

Tokenisation - de-identification technology that replaces private patient information with an encrypted token that can’t be reverse engineered to reveal the patient  - will unlock the power of data connectivity and enable the full potential of real-world data to be realised. The technology can create patient-specific tokens for any data set, allowing a patient’s data to be combined across multiple data sources without privacy being compromised. The potential of tokenisation was illustrated at the height of the pandemic when leading research institutions used tokenisation to share data for vaccine research purposes. Life sciences companies are showing interest in the concept, but better understanding of the technology’s role, use case, and implementation considerations will be needed before the benefits can be realised at scale.

This Financial Times Digital Dialogue, held in partnership with ICON, will bring together pioneering early adopters of clinical trial tokenisation and other industry experts to discuss the potentially transformative role tokenisation, and the ability it brings to  share patient-level data securely across the healthcare ecosystem,  can play in enhancing patient safety and improving drug development.

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