Clinical trials are the cornerstone of medicines development, providing rigorous data on the safety and efficacy of new treatments. Yet the controlled environment of a trial often differs significantly from the realities patients face in everyday clinical settings. Ensuring that trial results translate into meaningful real-world outcomes remains a persistent challenge in the pharmaceutical industry.

Dr. Lisa Egbuonu-Davis, a senior healthcare executive with extensive experience across biopharma and diagnostics, has spent her career addressing this gap. She notes that clinical trials are designed to show maximum efficacy under ideal conditions, which often limits the diversity of patient populations and the types of investigators involved. 

To bridge this gap, Dr. Egbuonu-Davis emphasizes diversifying trial participants, engaging a broader range of principal investigators, and using real-world data sources like electronic health records and patient-reported outcomes. She also highlights strategies to reduce administrative burdens on providers, integrating tools and micro-learning resources that allow patients to engage with their care outside of clinic visits:

“We need more tools to take the burden off of providers, so that they can actually have more time to focus on patient care, and so that our data collections are helpful rather than harmful.”

Her work at Sanofi demonstrates this approach in action, particularly in improving adherence to insulin therapy among ethnically diverse populations. Short, accessible educational videos helped patients understand the benefits of adherence and allowed real-world insights to inform the medicines development process.

Dr. Egbuonu-Davis also stresses the importance of aligning product development with real-world needs. By incorporating feedback from patients, providers, and payers early in the process, development teams can design products that are both clinically effective and acceptable to the populations they serve. As she puts it:

“You waste money when you develop products that nobody pays for, or when patients you thought were going to like your product didn’t like it and didn’t use it, that’s a lot of money and a lot of time.”

For medicines development professionals, the lesson is clear: innovation isn’t just about creating new compounds. Integrating patient-centered design, community engagement, and real-world insights ensures that medicines truly make a difference in the lives of those who need them.

This post highlights content from the “Clinical Trials and Real-World Effectiveness” segment of Dr. Egbuonu-Davis’s interview. This post highlights insights from the “Clinical Trials and Real-World Effectiveness” segment of Dr. Egbuonu-Davis’s interview. Additional segments examining related themes and implications will be released in upcoming posts. Stay tuned!

About Dr. Egbuonu-Davis

Lisa Egbuonu-Davis, MD, MPH, MBA currently serves as an independent board member and strategic advisor.  She has broad strategic and operational experience in pharmaceuticals, public health, and consulting, with expertise in implementing research, commercialization and investment strategies for innovative products and services.  She is currently a board director for three publicly traded companies: Omega Healthcare Investors (a REIT focused on skilled nursing facilities), Avanos Medical (a med tech company with products for pain and digestive health),and Phreesia (a software company supporting patient intake, payment processing and patient activation). In addition, she serves on the Johns Hopkins Medicine Board of Trustees.
In her prior role of Vice President, Medical Innovations, Danaher Diagnostics Platform, she provided medical advice to influence innovation strategy, partnerships, and investments across the diagnostics platform. She led the MD Council of diagnostic physicians, served as interim Chief Medical Officer to Leica and Beckman Coulter, subsidiaries of Danaher and led strategic initiatives in Covid-19 and Alzheimer’s.
Previously, Lisa was Vice President, Global Patient-Centered Outcomes and Solutions at Sanofi, Inc, where she created innovative patient programs, services, and tools to enhance patient self-management, adherence, and health outcomes in diabetes, cardiovascular, immunologic, and other chronic conditions. She led a pilot in multiple sclerosis, leveraging machine learning to assess patterns of clinical effectiveness. During her tenure at Pfizer, as Vice President of Medical Affairs and Vice Present of Global Outcomes Research, she built and led functions in medical affairs and outcomes research and developed evidence from clinical trials, observational studies, and “real world” analyses to support product value assessment throughout the product life cycle. Earlier in her career, she practiced pediatrics and led maternal and child health public health programs.
Lisa has a BS in biology from MIT and an MBA in health care management from Wharton; she earned an MD and MPH (epidemiology) degrees from Johns Hopkins, completed her pediatric residency at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (board-certified in pediatrics).

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