SCOPE 2026 Announces Winners Across Three Clinical Research Innovation Awards

SCOPE 2026 kicked off in Orlando this week honoring groups with awards recognizing their technical innovations and creative work in service of patients and sites. The opening evening focused on the front lines of clinical research: patients and the sites that serve them, with two of SCOPE's three awards programs announcing winners on Monday evening.

The 2026 Participant Engagement Award Winner was a bi-weekly webinar series—Better Together: Sharing Our Lupus Stories—designed to educate and empower female, African American, and other underrepresented lupus patients, as well as their caregivers and families created by Biogen and Proximity Health Solutions with BlackDoctor.org. The webinar series has surpassed one million cumulative views. The 10th annual Participant Engagement Award recognizes innovation and change in how the pharmaceutical industry communicates with participants in the fields of recruitment and retention in clinical trials.

The "Better Together: Sharing Our Lupus Stories" webinar series is a bi-weekly, one-hour digital event featuring expert-led discussions hosted by both a female African American lupus patient and a rheumatologist, focusing on topics that matter most to the lupus community. The series aims to increase disease understanding, build trust in clinical trials, and position Biogen as a trusted resource for patient-centric information.

The 2026 Site Innovation Award Winner is a partnership between TrialScreen, the largest global search engine of actively recruiting clinical trials, and the Association of Multisite Research Corporations to update site contact details at no charge, so that patients searching for a trial can easily be connected. The 3rd Annual Site Innovation Award recognizes sites and partnerships pioneering new approaches to improving clinical trials. Six finalist groups presented at SCOPE and fielded questions from a live judging panel.

TrialScreen sees over 51,000 people searching for trials on their site in a month, but at best 20% will find the contact details for a site, and even fewer will connect. The issue is missing or incomplete site contact details. TrialScreen and the Association of Multisite Research Corporations are calling for pharma sponsors to join them in correcting contact details for studies so that more patients are connected with their preferred site.

The 2026 Best of Show Awards at SCOPE had record participation—more than 70 new products were on display in the Exhibit Hall. Any company exhibiting at SCOPE was invited to enter a new product and the winners are chosen during public voting on site in Orlando. Five winners were named: Biorce was the overall winner; Rookie of the Year was ZigZag. Additional winners included Medidata, Innovative Trials, and Anju.

The top new products include Biorce's AI platform purpose-built for end-to-end clinical trial design and optimization and newcomer ZigZag's risk-intelligence platform that standardizes how Sponsors and CROs assess, compare, and strengthen clinical site quality. The other winners include Medidata's AI Protocol Optimization solution; Innovative Trials' Academy that delivers age-appropriate, genuinely engaging clinical research education that demystifies trials, builds confidence, and sparks interest in careers from research nurses to recruitment specialists; and Anju's web-based clinical and commercial business intelligence solution that aggregates, connects, and analyzes global clinical trial data and other public domain data into a single, intuitive database.

Voting links were available at finalists' booths and throughout the event. Voting opened when the exhibit hall opened on Tuesday, February 3 at 9:45 am and closed at 11:00 am on Wednesday, February 4. Winners were announced at 2 pm during the Coffee and Networking break in the Exhibit Hall on Wednesday and during the Wednesday afternoon plenary session.

Other Site Innovation Award finalists included Science 37's Direct-to-Patient Clinical Trial Site that enables study participation directly from the patient's home; Predoc's automated medical record retrieval and review system that decreases record retrieval turnaround times by 80%; the Medidata-Cogstate-SCRS collaboration delivering site experience in Central Nervous System clinical trials; Medical Research Network's initiative providing trial naïve research sites with tools, training, and ongoing support; and a partnership between Adams Clinical, Lilly, and CRIO focused on central eSource transforming site solutions.