Topography Team Q & A: Cristy Patterson
Establishing great working relationships with clinical trial sponsors is a critical part of bringing Topography’s mission to life. Cristy Patterson, our Senior Director, Life Sciences Partnerships works closely with biopharma, biotech, diagnostics, and medical device companies to bring their trials to physicians and practice groups all over the country.
Prior to joining Topography in 2021, Cristy held roles at Evidation Health and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, among many professional experiences touching healthcare. While studying for her MBA at the University of California, Berkeley, she worked on Johnson & Johnson’s Health Technology Partnerships & Corporate Development team.
We recently sat down with Cristy to learn more about the nature of her role, how Topography brings value to sponsors’ research, and why that benefits physicians. Cristy also shared a few high-level trends impacting the clinical research space that life sciences sponsors have their eyes on.
How do life sciences companies sponsoring clinical research benefit from working with Topography?
First and foremost, we connect them with practices with Topography’s research infrastructure best suited for their research. Topography has partnered with many different types of practices all over the country. We invest so much in getting to know our physicians. So we develop very curated study portfolios that best meet their patients’ needs. I think our life sciences partners also really appreciate the emphasis we place on getting their feedback on our business as we grow and scale. I gather feedback from our partners constantly, asking them to share their thoughts on features for our platform and to get their sense of unmet needs in the market. Many of our sponsors are also building credibility in the life sciences world to establish themselves as thought leaders in clinical research, and our partnership can support their efforts to build their profiles in the space. Finally, we’re also able to positively impact diversity within trials, given that our business model brings many practices and health systems’ research capabilities online in a new way, outside of traditional well-known academic research hubs.
You mentioned Topography’s great working relationships with physicians. Can you share more about what that means for life sciences partners?
Sure. Ultimately, it’s all about taking the time to really get to know physicians, in the same way we get to know our sponsors. The curation I spoke of earlier comes into play on both sides. There has been a tradition of study brokers in the clinical research space that take a willy-nilly approach driven by volume—”here are lots of studies, here are lots of physicians”—which gets you some of, but not all the way, there. In that model, there is no continuity between study placement and site performance. The way the Topography model works, we certainly see a high volume of opportunities, but, through our process and our platform, we’re able to facilitate the connections at scale and ensure that each of our sites performs well. With this approach, sponsors come back to our sites time and again, knowing that our platform facilitates continued success for them as well as our sites and investigators.
What I know based on my own experiences as well as working closely with our Head of Physician Partnerships, Clare Mullins, is that the volume of trial possibilities in any given specialty area can be overwhelming to a practice trying to develop a research program. If you think about the size of the clinical research space in terms of the sheer number of phase 2 studies and beyond, it’s asking a lot of physicians to sort through potential trials themselves, on top of all of their other responsibilities. That’s why so many physicians take more of a reactive approach to selecting trials, choosing what comes to them—they’re simply stretched thin. At Topography, we know what studies are out there, are attractive to our physicians, and are great for their patients, and we bring them forward for discussion. We also help to turn the process from reactive to proactive, by making sure sponsors and CROs know what types of trials our physicians are looking for.
Do you get compliments on Topography’s platform?
Yes, we do. While today there is a certain table stakes for technology that supports the clinical trials process, we often hear that sponsors enjoy a couple of specific pieces of our platform. Again, one of the benefits of being a company in growth mode is that all of the feedback I’m receiving from our life sciences partners actually gets into our product roadmap and is implemented quickly. Without getting too much into our secret sauce, it’s clear that sponsors love their ability to get granular when it comes to seeing data around the pre-screening process, often for the first time. We provide visibility into the funnel and help them to understand why patients drop off, and where: Too many visits? Too hard? How many people have we disqualified, and why? Life sciences companies can access all of this information themselves in a self-serve fashion. So I would say detail and granularity is something appreciated by partners across the board.
What are some clinical research trends sponsors are paying attention to?
Right now, efficiency is top of mind for our life sciences partners. I get many questions about how fast we can get up and running, including negotiating budgets, contracts, and being ready to go for enrollment. Speed is key. So is quality, which has always been a part of the research conversation, but, these days, is more important than ever. If investigators get dinged on the quality of studies, that means the investigator is noted as such in every database. Obviously that causes problems for sponsors as well as physicians, because it makes it harder for them to build up a research CV and pursue future studies. Also, our life sciences partners are paying attention to the role of AI, but there are so many players doing something with AI that it’s hard for them to sort through the noise. And DEI is always a part of the conversation—how can we bring research to patients instead of bringing patients to research? I’m biased, but I think Topography has a good answer for that question.
