SCOPE Summit 2026 Review
ORLANDO | 2 – 5 February 2026
The SCOPE Summit is an important forum for understanding how sponsors and CROs address the growing complexity of clinical trials. We were particularly interested to learn about operational friction and how organizations improve processes, partnerships and governance to overcome these challenges.
Many sponsors face similar issues, including cross-functional alignment, vendor management, site burden and AI adoption. Understanding these trends helps the sponsor, CRO and vendors optimise their approach to improve efficient collaboration.
With so many insightful talks, it would be difficult to summarise them all, so we've chosen to highlight the ones our team believed would be most useful to our clients.
Sanofi’s Cross-Functional Collaboration: Breaking Silos for Clinical Trial Success
Sunee Reiner, R&D Medical Director, Sanofi
Robert Robitaille, US Clinical Study Operations, Sanofi
Sanofi described familiar obstacles - long planning cycles, siloed communication, and limited transparency across functions. These issues create unnecessary burden for sites and can slow down execution.
What they changed
They brought medical affairs and clinical operations together much earlier in the lifecycle of the study, as early as Phase II. Instead of engaging sequentially, both groups aligned on strategy, messaging, and site engagement planning from the start.
Key components of their approach:
A single point of contact per site
Consistent monthly engagement
Shared dashboards showing who was interacting with investigators
Coordinated congress and outreach strategies
Clear study engagement blueprints
Results reported:
60% increase in patient recruitment
Site engagement time reduced to 7 hours
Early medical involvement and operational transparency reduced duplication, strengthened messaging, and improved recruitment performance. Alignment upstream translated directly into downstream efficiency.
Transforming Bayer’s Supplier Ecosystem: Driving Efficiency and Capability in Clinical Trials
James Chennels, Strategic Alliances Lead, Bayer
Nick Lewis, Sr Director, Head Clinical Vendor Management, Bayer
Bayer highlighted three pressures reshaping clinical development:
Increasing regulatory burden and patient expectations
A shift toward precision medicine and complex modalities
A shared-ownership operating model
These forces demanded a more flexible and connected supplier ecosystem.
What they changed
Bayer implemented a new supplier strategy based on as few suppliers as possible, as many as necessary.
They broke down silos between procurement and clinical functions and created a combined Alliance & Partnership Management (APM) structure integrating procurement intelligence with clinical expertise.
This included:
Tiered, relationship-specific partnership models
An AI-powered internal assistant to quickly access supplier information
A formal 6-month ecosystem reassessment process with a 12–18 month forward view
Results reported:
Reduced friction for study teams
Faster access to performance data and contacts
Positive feedback from senior stakeholders within months of launch
Supplier management is moving from transactional oversight to structured ecosystem governance. Strategic consolidation, clearer accountability, and easier access to performance insights that (or something similar) improve execution consistency.
How Key Clinical Operations Experts Can Partner to Successfully and Efficiently Deliver Outsourced Clinical Trials
Melody Aldred, Study Director, Community Lead, Novartis
Heidi Pereira, Vendor Program Strategy Director, Novartis
With 55% of sponsors planning to increase spending on clinical trial services, outsourcing is expanding, but so are oversight complexities.
Even long-term vendor relationships experience recurring issues:
Communication gaps
Inconsistent processes
Variable oversight
Novartis developed a structured vendor partnership program with:
A defined leadership model (strategy director, alliance leads, trial vendor managers)
A structured assessment framework for outsourcing decisions
A study leader community with monthly forums and shared problem-solving
Role-specific training and micro-learning modules
After analyzing a challenging study, they created a standardized operations manual for outsourced trials, applied consistently to both internal teams and vendors.
Results reported
Reduced individual burden
Greater oversight consistency
Improved flexibility
Recruitment completed at least 5 months ahead of target in the case study
Standardization and shared operating models strengthen oversight without slowing delivery. Structured governance enables outsourcing at scale.
The Partnership Playbook: Aligning CROs, Imaging, and AI for Smarter Trials
Justin Chadwell (Perceptive)
Doug Fulling (Perceptive)
Wendy Roberts (IQVIA)
Katrina Arceta (Astellas)
Astellas shared how AI is being used to evaluate RFP responses. Vendors must follow strict formatting to enable automated review. Knockout questions and weighted scoring models are increasingly common.
However, human oversight remains essential, ambiguous responses require manual interpretation and governance frameworks are still evolving.
There was also acknowledgment that vendors may eventually optimize responses against sponsor AI models, reducing differentiation in written proposals.
If RFP responses become uniformly strong, differentiation will move toward:
Execution credibility
Human interaction
Operational performance
Interview-based assessment
Panellists noted that sponsors increasingly expect CROs and vendors to lead AI adoption across:
Study start-up
Site selection
Enrolment forecasting
Data workflows
A concern raised was inconsistent AI use at the site level, including unsupervised use of tools like ChatGPT, which introduces compliance and quality risk.
AI is accelerating processes, but governance and execution maturity remain differentiators. Technology is becoming embedded across the lifecycle, yet human accountability continues to matter.
Overall Learnings
Overall, SCOPE Summit 2026 underscored that sponsors, CROs and vendors are shifting from siloed, transactional ways of working to integrated, governed partnerships that balance standardization and enable flexibility across the trial lifecycle. Earlier cross-functional alignment, thoughtful supplier consolidation, and structured outsourcing frameworks are helping reduce site burden and improve delivery predictability. At the same time, clinical trial teams are investing in processes that rapidly embed AI into evaluation and execution. However, as we have seen in the examples above, opinion leaders in this space maintain that it is robust governance, human accountability and proven execution credibility that are emerging as the real differentiators.