86TWENTYFOURSEVENBIOPHARMA Issue 3 / October 2025 BIOTECH Every year, the Military Health System Research Symposium (MHSRS) – this year the event took place in Orlando, Florida – brings together the brightest minds in military medicine, active-duty clinicians, civilian researchers, and agency leaders, to share groundbreaking science that supports the health and readiness of U.S. service members and veterans. Rather than running in insolation of each other, military sponsored trials and the wider private ecosystem of trials have many lessons and shared narrative that can potentially accelerate drug and device development. We caught up with Emmes’ Bryan Patterson, Senior Vice President of Government BD & Capture at the event. With more than two decades of experience navigating partnerships with the Department of Defense (DoD), NIH, and BARDA, Bryan shares how these trials and funding mechanisms are evolving—and why biotechs should be paying much closer attention. Bryan, let’s begin with the fundamentals. What sets military clinical trials apart from traditional, commercially sponsored ones? One notable immediate difference is in whom we are designing trials for and the population we’re working to protect. For example, in many military settings this might be for what the Department of Defense calls the “warfighter.” These are frontline soldiers, typically younger and in good health, but often deployed to austere environments like deserts or tropical regions where they face unique health risks. That means we’re running trials for vaccines and treatments targeting diseases rarely seen in the U.S., such as Rift Valley fever or Lassa fever, which become real concerns in regions like West Africa, and leishmaniasis in the Middle East. Beyond the medical focus, military trials also have distinct and complex regulatory and operational considerations. Unlike commercial studies, which go through a central IRB, DoD trials require an additional layer of approval from the DHA Office of Research Protections. Understanding this process and building in the right timelines is essential to keep studies on track. Another major difference is the sensitivity of the data involved. These aren’t top-secret trials per say, but they do involve highly sensitive information, especially when active-duty personnel are participants. That’s why data security is non-negotiable. So you need a highly intelligent and complex data management system. At Emmes, we use our in-house, commercialoff-the-shelf eClinical platform (Veridix eClinical).
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