Clinical Research

Clinical Trials

Building on 60 years of clinical research experience, Westat serves as a Contract Research Organization (CRO) investigating promising new drugs and therapeutics. Our team has experience designing and implementing clinical trials for oncology, pediatrics, infectious diseases, vaccines, rare and emerging diseases, and more. We work as an extension of your team, designing and implementing innovative, rigorous, credible clinical trials that deliver high value and cost efficiency. Westat will partner with you every step of the way—addressing challenges with creativity and integrity. We have proven our ability to quickly adjust to shifting priorities during the clinical research process. We pride ourselves on creative problem-solving, attributed to years of experience investigating new treatments and emerging infectious diseases.

Multisite Epidemiology Studies

Powered by data science, Westat’s epidemiologists look for the causes and risk factors of disease by studying patterns, frequencies, and preventive interventions across places and populations. Our research pushes the boundaries of public health knowledge, investigating important issues such as the household transmission rates of COVID-19 and the comparative effectiveness of FDA-approved influenza vaccines. We use innovative tools, including virtual data collection platforms and at-home participant specimen collection, to remotely conduct research across the country. This work aims to expand on existing scientific literature while increasing research inclusion, including among populations that are historically underrepresented in clinical studies.

Network Coordinating Centers

Coordinating centers are a key part of multicenter research initiatives; they’re centralized hubs that pool complex biomedical and administrative data from multiple research centers, then aggregate, manage, and analyze the data, and finally make the data accessible to researchers. Our management of coordinating centers helps collate public health data to provide insights on a range of issues. These data have revealed how environmental exposures affect human health over a lifetime, what research programs reduce HIV incidence rates in at-risk youth, and the effects of SARS-CoV-2 on community transmission and the blood supply. We have supported the investigation of underlying genetic components related to heart, lung, and blood disorders, coordinated the development of large-scale omics datasets to inform precision medicine initiatives, and so much more.

Real-World Data

We build sophisticated data infrastructure to help our clients access, harmonize, and analyze real-world data to answer critical questions. Our systems assemble data from our integrated health care and hospital network partners to rapidly produce estimates of COVID-19 and influenza vaccine effectiveness and to characterize the clinical epidemiology of respiratory viruses, informing key policy decisions. Our research data platform and team have also supported national SARS-CoV-2 serosurveillance by collecting and analyzing blood donation data. Our experience with real-world data positions us to help our clients understand and respond to future pandemics.