How can digital technologies help engage people in biomedical research? Ed Ramos, senior director of Digital Clinical Trials, and his team at the Scripps Research Digital Trials Center are leveraging an entirely remote trial model that aims to make participation convenient and rewarding for everyone.

What is your research focus?

There are two main areas related to biomedical research that my team and I focus on. The first is structural, in the sense of thinking about how we change the infrastructure that supports clinical trials. Access, transparency, value and burden are just some of the issues we try to address through various innovations. We recognize that participants—often the people and communities most in need of new treatments—benefit when they are placed at the center of the study design. This approach makes their experience more enjoyable and meaningful rather than an inconvenience.

Part of our study design makes significant use of digital health technologies such as wearables and sensors that capture various physiological measures. We use these measurements to observe correlations with health outcomes and to answer questions such as: Can data from a consumer wearable predict the onset of an infectious disease? Can sleep be used as an intervention to help control blood sugar? Can we measure changes in quality of life via passive sensing?

Is there a project that you are currently working on that you are particularly excited about?

We recently shifted part of our research focus toward women’s health. Historically, limited women’s participation in clinical research has hampered advancements in so many areas, including maternal health, sex-specific health conditions and even general health as experienced by women.

With an aging population, there has been increasing attention to Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias. Unfortunately, two-thirds of AD patients are women. Why is that? One reason could be that women undergo a major physiological shift during and around menopause. It’s a great place to start investigating how these changes might be linked to neurological shifts that can manifest into diseases like AD. We’re still in the proposing stages of this research, but we’re eager to dive in and apply our expertise to help move the field forward.

What made you want to pursue your research career at Scripps Research?

Prior to joining Scripps Research, I spent nearly 15 years in the federal government. I took pride in my work as a civil servant and dedicated much of my early career to a variety of public health efforts. Toward the end of my time in federal service, I was looking for an environment that allowed me to test new ideas, fail fast and develop innovative solutions. There are few people better suited to provide that environment than Dr. Eric Topol. His vision for digital medicine remains unmatched, and he welcomed the idea to launch the Digital Trials Center, which I co-founded with Katie Baca-Motes in 2020. Shortly thereafter, the COVID-19 pandemic created an immediate need for decentralized and digital clinical trials, and we haven’t stopped since!

What do mentoring and community engagement mean to you?

Mentoring is essential. To me, mentoring means taking one’s professional and lived experiences and using them as a foundation for nurturing, guiding and advising someone in support of their goals. In the biomedical sciences, mentoring is a key component for trainees to navigate their professional growth, especially for those that don’t have the generational institutional knowledge to lean on. Many of us are making it up as we go, because the blueprint wasn’t there for us. Mentors play an impactful role in filling that gap.

Community engagement is about creating a framework that allows for discourse to better understand the sentiments, perceptions, history and aspirations of people who share a common interest or need. We seek community engagement to ensure our own perspectives don’t overshadow those of others. This is crucial when designing clinical studies so that our recruitment messaging resonates with the study population and so we are returning health insights that are meaningful.

The common thread between mentoring and community engagement is listening. When we prioritize listening, we deprioritize our own agenda and allow our empathy to surface, focusing on the needs of others. Listening is critical for building trust, understanding challenges faced by others and co-creating solutions—all vital components of successful mentoring and community engagement.