Meet the team: Jen Dumbleton, Head of Trial Management

Jen Dumbleton joined Protas in September 2022. By the following year, she was our new Head of Trial Management and Product Owner. She talks about how her role contributes to transforming clinical trials.

What brought you to Protas?

I loved science at school but also wanted to be a businesswoman. So, at university I read Chemistry and Management Studies.

I really enjoyed my degree – but, like a lot of people, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next. (I just knew I didn’t want to work in a lab!)

I started work in a data management department for a contract research organisation (CRO), purely because it was a job after university – but was incredibly lucky that a vacancy opened up in the monitoring department.

Monitoring is, in my opinion, the best way to learn about clinical trials. You’re the “interface” between the pharmaceutical company and the trial sites, and you need to know all the regulations to be sure the sites are conducting the trial properly.

It was a big learning curve and a good introduction to clinical trials.

I transitioned from being a Clinical Research Associate (CRA)to a Trial Manager in academic trials, where I ran trials within a university setting for 13 years.

I heard about Protas through Prof Sir Martin Landray. Our paths had crossed professionally prior to Protas being founded. He had asked me to speak at a conference about my experiences of running low-cost trials in England, particularly about a large-scale trial I was running at the time in primary care.

That was quite a few years before I heard about Protas, but in the meantime, the COVID-19 pandemic happened and Martin’s name obviously became well known, certainly in the clinical trials world.

He started to post on LinkedIn about starting up a new organisation which was everything I had been thinking about trials and everything I wanted to be involved in.

I really enjoyed my previous job and wasn’t looking to move, but it was like reading the mission that I always wanted to read, and so I got in touch and it went from there.

How did being Product Owner of Cantata come about?

I’ve worked in trial management for most of my career and really enjoy running all aspects of a trial, from protocol design to trial analysis, with all the problem solving involved along the way.

Although “Product Owner” wasn’t part of my original role, working as a trial manager meant I had a useful perspective from which to help develop our unified clinical trials management platform, Cantata.

This was an amazing opportunity to help shape the technology system that was going to make clinical trials easier for everyone using it.

Protas needed someone to take on the Product Owner role. Being someone who likes to get stuck in, I said yes. So, although it started as a temporary measure, I now absolutely love that part of my role.

What’s unique about Protas?

The first thing that always comes to mind is the people.

People at Protas are wonderful. I respect every single person I work with. It’s inspiring to be surrounded by people with different backgrounds who all share the mission to improve the way trials are done so that solutions to global health problems can be found.

Then it’s about Protas’ focus on common diseases, because that’s going to have the biggest impact for the most amount of people worldwide. We’re trying to change the way things are done on a global scale

I think an important reset needs to happen in the industry. We don’t have to look hard into the cost of clinical trials to know they’re too expensive. There are potentially solutions to medical problems out there and we just can’t afford to even research them.

The opportunity to start from scratch, with the expertise of the people at Protas combined with our not-for-profit mindset, is not only a unique opportunity but an important one.

What’s your team like?

What’s wonderful about my team is that they are fantastic individuals who work fantastically as a team.

They come with their own brilliant amounts of expertise in trial management, from different backgrounds and quite different experiences of trial methodology.

It’s a small team, but a skilled, loyal, hardworking, dedicated team who are also lots of fun to work with, and whom I consider friends as well as colleagues.

In terms of Cantata, I feel privileged to work very closely with the IT and Business Analyst Teams here and with the team at Slalom (our technology partner). All fantastic individuals with brilliant minds who can convert business requirements into something that can be built for an IT system, and they do it with such enthusiasm and intelligence.

What’s special about Cantata?

Cantata is a trial manager’s dream. It’s a one-stop shop for your trial without needing to look at multiple different systems and without having to transcribe data from one place to another.

It’s a single system where all the information you need to manage a trial is housed. That’s a really strong selling point in and of itself!

But the other unique part of it is the fact it’s configurable to the specific trial you’re running – in other words, every field is there because it is needed and adds value.

With Cantata, and people like Martin and others at Protas who have decades of experience in running trials and working in the policy area, I believe we have the capacity to shift the landscape of clinical trials.

We’ve brought experts together around the mission of smarter clinical trials, developed an IT system to make sure that mission can be delivered, and we’re influencing global policy – all with participants at the heart of what we’re doing.

We can genuinely change health outcomes. We have all the right ingredients.