Castor Blog

Patient organizations in rare disease are no longer waiting for pharma to act, and a growing number now sponsor their own trials. In this Clinical Leader conversation, Craig Lipset and Dr. Derk Arts explain why the math forces it: the industry approves roughly 50 new medicines a year while researchers characterize 150 to 250 new rare diseases. They cover how small populations can still generate real evidence, why patients should govern their own data, and how master protocols can cluster related conditions under one design. A practical look at an efficiency lever that has been hiding in plain sight for clinical-development leaders.

Curavit has acquired Lindus Health’s CRO assets, bringing US and European trial delivery under one roof while Lindus moves to drug development. In a Castor LinkedIn Live, Derk Arts and independent analyst Joel White sat down with Curavit CEO Joel Morse to unpack what the deal signals for sponsors running trials across the Atlantic. The conversation covered why one team removes cross-region friction, why building versus buying clinical technology is so hard, how controlling recruitment gives sponsors timing and budget certainty, and where AI realistically fits today. This recap pulls the highlights and points to the full on-demand recording.

Anthropic’s CEO says AI could cure most disease within a decade. The harder question is what happens to the humans in the study, the patients and the physicians, when the machine gets that good. Castor’s Derk Arts and Aptitude Health’s Matthew Gordon took it to a live, no-slides debate: does real-world evidence still need the physician? Derk argued the provocative side, that patient-controlled data and AI can carry it. Matthew argued the physician is still where the value is. Where they landed, and where AI actually changes the clinician’s job rather than removing it, is the recap. Watch on demand.

Medical device, diagnostic, and IVD teams face a hard trade-off. Enterprise EDC systems bring cost and build time a low-complexity study never needs, and spreadsheets leave auditors with nothing usable. In a 30-minute product spotlight, Castor’s Lisa Charlton and Angie Martinez showed a third path, building a compliant study live with no code on the Castor Essentials program. This recap covers the med tech data dilemma, the native randomization module that runs inside the EDC, real-time edit checks and an immutable audit trail, and where an Essentials study goes as a program grows toward post-market evidence. Watch the full build on demand.

Most AI pitched at clinical research sites falls apart the moment a real site owner touches it. So we skipped the polished demo and let a skeptic try to break ours, live. Brad Hightower, CEO of Hightower Clinical, joined Castor CEO Derk Arts to stress-test Castor Catalyst with his own modified files on air. The session covers the honest state of AI at sites, why direct-to-patient AI is the last thing to try rather than the first, and the boring use case that actually pays off: getting source data into the EDC without manual re-entry, human-reviewed. Watch the full test on demand.

The process for localizing patient questionnaires and moving them onto screens has barely changed in twenty years, while global trials now launch in twenty to fifty languages at once. In this webinar recap, Dan Herron of RWS and Willie Muehlhausen, Co-CEO of Safira, join Castor Chief Product Officer Lisa Charlton to map where AI genuinely accelerates eCOA localization and migration workflows and where human judgment stays non-negotiable. The recap covers the five to fifteen business day savings RWS measured in proof-of-concept projects, automated migration QC, and why AI cannot yet validate its own output. Watch the full session on demand.

Nine years into EU MDR, the conversation has moved past “how do we collect PMCF data” to a harder question: do we need to collect it at all? Post-Market Surveillance is mandatory for all devices under MDR. Post-Market Clinical Follow-up is not. In a recent live session, Dr. Bassil Akra, EU MDR Expert and Founder of AKRA TEAM, and Derk Arts, CEO of Castor, walked through what the PMS-PMCF distinction means in practice, how the proposed MDR 2.0 revision is reshaping expectations, and where AI-assisted data extraction changes the calculation for manufacturers deciding whether active collection is warranted. Watch the recording free.

eCOA systems contain time-dependent logic that unfolds over months of a live study: compliance windows, adaptive triggers, missed-visit alerts. The available UAT window is typically a few days. That gap is the temporal conundrum.

In May 2026, Castor’s Connor Ladly Fredeen walked through three AI-assisted approaches that compress months of study timeline into testable days: backdated data entry, exploratory autonomous testing, and AI timeline compression. Safira’s Gauri Nagrani addressed regulatory independence requirements and where AI can and cannot take ownership. The recording covers all three methods and the Q&A on ALCOA+ compliance. Watch on demand.

Surgical registry data entry runs 10 to 45 minutes per patient chart. That was the number Sangrag Ganguli, MD, SAGES HPB research fellow at the University of Chicago Medicine, put on the table at the May 6 SAGES x Castor Catalyst webinar. The session covered how Catalyst processes operative notes and discharge summaries in three steps: PHI de-identification, AI extraction with source citations, and human review before anything enters the EDC. Derk Arts walked through a live extraction on a hepatobiliary surgical document. The 35-minute recording is built for PIs managing multi-center registries and research residents responsible for study data quality.