Xtalks Featured Member: Siobhan McKenna-Power, Operations Manager, 4G Clinical

Discover Xtalks Featured Community Member Siobhan McKenna-Power, Operations Manager at 4G Clinical, who specializes in translating clinical trial protocols into operational Randomisation and Trial Supply Management (RTSM) systems. Read how her work is helping simplify complex trial designs while ensuring accuracy, compliance and patient safety across global studies.

What Are Your Proudest Life Science Achievements?

My day job is to turn clinical trial protocols into a living, breathing RTSM system. I have been lucky enough to work across many clinical trials where the molecules have become commercially available, actively changing the lives of people around the world — extending people’s lives and improving the quality of life for individuals. There is such a joyful feeling that comes from being just a tiny part of that process.

What Are Your Day-to-Day Job Highlights?

My day job is to turn clinical trial protocols into a living, breathing RTSM system. The challenges are staying compliant with the protocol and the regulatory guidelines (ICH-GCP), as well as anticipating how the clinical staff at the site are going to interact with and interpret the protocol. It’s my job to be their advocate to the pharmaceutical companies leading the trials, sharing that unnecessary complexity actually makes the job of the doctors and nurses more difficult.  This means that I need to be the voice of reason in the conversation.

The biggest challenge for us working on an RTSM platform is really making sure that the right medication gets to the right person at the right time; this can involve figuring out how to dispense and track medication to multiple people from a single vial such as with the COVID-19 trials, or looking at complex supply chains for personalised medicines such as CAR-T or stem cell clinical trials. At my heart, I’m a problem solver, and this is the ultimate puzzle with real-life consequences.

What Are Your Favorite Life Science Innovations?

This is quite a hard question to answer, but I think I’m going to select the emergence of personalised medicine, especially stem cells. Recent articles show that these are growing and starting to demonstrate a way of using these wonderful little cells to target and reverse disorders that we believed were incurable.

A second innovation has got to be AI and computer models that are taking existing proven medications on the market and running simulations against other conditions to see if they might work to help minimize or treat those disorders without incurring the cost of starting a full animal or human trial. In my profession, there’s an expression, if you’re going to fail, fail early.  You can immediately move on to the next drug or condition without the huge overheads that come from clinical trial setup.

What Is Your Vision for the Future of the Industry?

I believe there will be more virtual trials, incorporating datasets gathered from clinical trials that have been run previously, and then used as comparator information in new trials. The use of analytical AI is opening up a lot of new possibilities for data analysis, which means that trial setup will be quicker and leaner. This means a more immediate impact on people’s lives.

Apply Yourself or Nominate a Peer

Do you know someone doing incredible work in the life sciences? Or perhaps you’re proud of your own journey and want to inspire others? We’d love to hear from you.

You can apply to be an Xtalks Featured Community Member or nominate a colleague through our simple online form. It takes just a few minutes, and it could open doors to new conversations, partnerships and recognition across the industry.

Let’s celebrate the people driving life sciences forward, one story at a time.