A year of meaningful engagement, shared learning, and strengthened partnerships across global healthcare
2025 marked a pivotal chapter for Alpha Clinical Development. Throughout the year, our team engaged in many of the industry’s most influential global conferences—forums where capital, science, regulation, and patient need were debated in real time. These gatherings offered far more than scientific updates or market intelligence; they created environments for meaningful dialogue, new partnerships, and a deeper understanding of the rapidly evolving forces shaping today’s development landscape.
Our presence at these events underscored a guiding principle of our mission: progress in clinical development is built on collaboration, clear strategy, and disciplined execution. Each conversation served as both a contribution and a catalyst, ensuring that our expertise remains closely aligned with emerging priorities across the global healthcare community.
Strategic Leadership Conversations That Shaped the Start of the Year
Our year opened with focused strategic dialogue at the Fierce JPM Healthcare Conference and the TD Cowen Healthcare Conference. Both meetings highlighted shifting expectations around program planning, long-term portfolio direction, and the operational realities facing organizations in a rapidly changing environment.
Fierce JPM Healthcare: Capital with Higher Conviction
Fierce JPM Week convened founders, investors, large pharma, and service providers against the backdrop of a more disciplined funding climate. Several themes stood out:
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Capital remains available—but story alone is no longer enough. Investors are applying higher thresholds, demanding credible development strategies, clearly defined value-inflection points, and operational plans grounded in current regulatory and cost realities. The role of external partners in derisking execution is central to these assessments.
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Women’s health moved from side-panel to center stage. A dedicated Women’s Health track reflected renewed momentum, reinforced by the U.S. administration’s USD 1 billion commitment to advancing women’s health research and ARPA-H’s support for high-risk, high-reward initiatives. Broader societal pressures around trust, access, and affordability are reshaping how organizations prioritize innovation and long-term value creation.
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AI is becoming core infrastructure. Rather than a stand-alone differentiator, AI is increasingly seen as an enabling layer across R&D and clinical operations—supporting faster start-up, smarter feasibility, patient identification, and more informed portfolio decisions.
In this setting, our discussions centered on how Alpha Clinical’s structured and pragmatic support can help teams translate investor-facing narratives into executable operational plans—particularly for small and mid-cap organizations pursuing a “fewer, better” trial mindset.
TD Cowen Healthcare Conference: Where Ambition Meets Execution
TD Cowen’s 2025 outlook highlighted key areas aligned with our client base, including advances in immunology, precision medicine, neuropsychiatry, pain, tools and diagnostics, and disciplined small-cap launches. Conversations revealed several cross-cutting themes:
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Immunology programs are being evaluated as systems, not single assets—with attention on biomarker strategies, regulatory-credible trial designs, and feasibility in high-burden populations.
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Precision medicine is now a horizontal capability, extending beyond oncology to rare disease, immunology, and neuropsychiatry. Diagnostics, data infrastructure, and operational design must be planned in parallel from the outset.
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Neuropsychiatry and pain require rigorous foundations. Enthusiasm for new mechanisms is tempered by demand for real-world adoption strategies, robust endpoints, and clearly segmented patient populations.
These insights further sharpened how we deliver structured guidance across development programs—from early feasibility to operational frameworks—reinforcing the need for steady judgment, dependable oversight, and adaptable planning.
Evolving Clinical Leadership: Insights from CMO Summit 360°
The CMO Summit 360 Congress offered a valuable forum for candid dialogue with clinical leaders. Themes that resonated strongly with our work included:
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The CMO as enterprise integrator. Clinical leaders are increasingly evaluated on their ability to prioritize assets under capital constraints, communicate credible strategies to boards and investors, and translate policy shifts into executable development plans.
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AI as a targeted tool—not a blanket solution. Conversations emphasized data quality, governance, and human oversight. Leading CMOs described using AI to stress-test protocol complexity, anticipate operational risk, and support early pattern recognition.
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Patient-centricity embedded into trial architecture. Rather than broad statements, patient and caregiver insight is shaping endpoint selection, visit schedules, decentralized elements, and country and site models for hard-to-reach populations.
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Medical Affairs as a strategic bridge. Field insights are directly feeding into protocol refinements, evidence-generation strategies, and label-expansion planning.
These discussions reinforced the importance of Alpha Clinical’s role as a scaffolding partner—supporting CMOs across vendors, geographies, and functions with clear information flow and robust, interpretable data.
Deepening Scientific Insight Across Global Medical Congresses
Our engagement at ERS, ASCO, ESMO Berlin, ACR, and UEG Week provided an essential window into emerging science and real-world clinical complexity across respiratory disease, oncology, immunology, autoimmune conditions, and gastroenterology.
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ERS: A global focus on respiratory health highlighted evolving patient trajectories and their implications for inclusion criteria, endpoints, and follow-up strategies—informing our approach to feasibility and site selection in respiratory trials.
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ASCO & ESMO: Oncology continues moving both earlier and broader. Discussions underscored the rise of supportive interventions (such as structured exercise), the growing role of MRD and molecular classification, and the operational demands of biomarker-rich, adaptive designs.
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ACR & UEG Week: These meetings illustrated the complexity of autoimmunity and gastroenterology in real-world practice, with actionable insights on multimodal endpoints, standard-of-care variation, and feasibility challenges in IBD and related GI programs.
Across these congresses, our teams returned with a sharper understanding of how scientific nuance intersects with everyday clinical practice—enabling us to refine protocol evaluation, site engagement, and evidence-based feasibility.
Safety & Pharmacovigilance Engagement
World Drug Safety Europe and Americas reinforced the growing centrality of robust, well-governed safety frameworks in development. Discussions focused on AI governance, EVDAS utilization, lifecycle benefit–risk strategies, patient-centered safety systems, and the evolving expectations around transparency and auditability.
These themes align closely with Alpha Clinical’s established pharmacovigilance model—built around integrated workflows, rigorous documentation, regulatory alignment, and AI use that prioritizes oversight and inspection readiness.
The Principles That Shape Our Work
Across every conference this year, one expectation remained consistent: teams want partners who bring clarity, reliability, and thoughtful guidance to clinical development.
Alpha Clinical Development’s services—spanning clinical operations, medical oversight, regulatory strategy, safety management, and data integrity—are built on that foundation. By combining strategic insight with disciplined execution, we help programs advance with confidence and well-supported planning.
Looking Ahead to 2026
As we enter 2026, we carry forward the insights, relationships, and shared learning gained throughout the past year. These engagements have refined our perspective and strengthened our commitment to delivering informed, collaborative operational leadership.
In the year ahead, we will continue to invest in the areas that matter most: disciplined execution, scientific fluency, and communication that supports clear, timely decision-making. We remain dedicated to partnering with teams striving to bring meaningful therapies to patients worldwide—and to doing so with the steadiness, integrity, and practical judgment that define our work.
Sophia Nematollahi 
