Rethinking Clinical Development: Smarter Decisions Start with Smarter Tools

In clinical development, complexity isn’t new, but it is accelerating. Study teams face increasing protocol demands, tighter timelines, and fierce competition for sites and patients. The pressure to move faster, with greater confidence and less risk, is higher than ever.

Yet even with more data at their fingertips, sponsors still run into a familiar roadblock: turning that data into meaningful decisions.

At Citeline, we’ve spent the past 18 months reengineering how our solutions support clinical teams. The result is a new generation of capabilities grounded in curated data, powered by AI, and built to help you plan smarter, reduce risk, and execute with precision. But more importantly, they’re designed by SMEs around the real-world problems you face every day.

The Problem: Too Much Data, Not Enough Insight

The Solution: From Curated Information to Contextual Intelligence

Most clinical teams don’t struggle with a lack of data; they struggle with understanding what it means:

• Which trends are relevant?
• Which comparisons matter?
• What benchmarks actually apply to your study?

Citeline’s data has long been trusted for its breadth, quality, and expert curation. But today’s questions require more than static snapshots. That’s why we’re shifting our focus from collection to interpretation.

Our enhanced platforms now surface insights like full trial completion timelines (not just primary endpoints), rare disease expansion across hundreds of indications, and enriched search capabilities. These enhancements help teams answer not just what’s happening, but what it means — faster and with more context.

The Problem: Protocol Planning Is High Stakes and Low Visibility

The Solution: Smarter Design, Grounded in Real Data

The decisions that go into designing a trial require complete information, including inclusion/exclusion criteria, endpoints, enrollment forecasts and more.

That’s where Citeline SmartSolutions comes in. Tools like Protocol SmartDesign use historical data and AI to suggest scientifically sound, recruitment-friendly protocol elements tailored to your disease, even down to the biomarker level. And with Cohort Builder, launching this Summer , sponsors can test their draft protocol against real-world patient populations to flag screen failure risks and optimize criteria before the trial begins.

It’s a fundamental shift, from trial and error to trial design backed by evidence.

The Problem: Feasibility Still Feels Like Guesswork

The Solution: AI-Driven Site and Investigator Selection

Choosing the right sites is one of the most important (and most difficult) parts of trial planning. Data on past performance data are scattered, incomplete, or too generic to be useful.

We’ve changed that.

Investigator SmartSelect, built on Sitetrove and proprietary performance metrics, enables sponsors to identify not just experienced investigators, but high-performing ones, including new, previously overlooked candidates. Meanwhile, our Site Compare tool allows side-by-side evaluation of up to 10 sites at once, and our Expert Finder spotlighs the KOLs who can influence credibility and enrollment.

And because feasibility isn’t static, our platform now reveals real-time enrollment trends, regional trial activity, and competitive congestion, for a more accurate picture of where patients are, and how quickly you can reach them.

The Problem: Competitor Pipelines Are a Blind Spot

The Solution: Competitive Benchmarking Built In

Staying ahead in a crowded landscape means knowing how your drug pipeline stacks up.

Citeline’s upgraded Pharmaprojects+ makes this possible with two powerful tools:

• Company Compare helps teams benchmark pipelines by indication, development phase, MOA, and more.
• Drug Similarity instantly highlights comparable compounds based on structure, mechanism, and use to help teams understand how their asset differs, or where threats might emerge.

With these tools, strategic decisions become grounded in facts — not assumptions.

The Problem: AI Promises Everything, but Rarely Delivers Practical Value

Meet Ella: AI-Powered Answers, Not AI Hype

AI is everywhere, but for most clinical teams, it still feels abstract. That’s why we built Ella, Citeline’s AI assistant trained on thousands of real analyst queries. Ask Ella a clinical question — whether it’s trial benchmarks, investigator history, or competitive activity — and you get a curated, evidence-based response in seconds.

Ella pulls from validated data across Pharmaprojects, Trialtrove, and Sitetrove — meaning you’re never guessing where the insight came from. And unlike general AI tools, Ella is purpose-built for life sciences.

Smarter Clinical Development Starts Here

At Citeline, it’s not about adding features. It’s about solving the questions that slow you down and building the tools clinical teams actually need. Whether you’re preparing your next protocol or just trying to make sense of the landscape, the path to better answers starts here.

Explore the latest tools from Citeline — and start building a faster, more confident clinical strategy.