Interview with Kieran Hamilton, Business Analyst
Kieran Hamilton works in the IT Team with a focus on Cantata, our unified clinical trials management platform. Kieran shares his role, how Cantata is a game-changer and what is great about working at Protas.

What brought you to Protas?
Kieran Hamilton: I’ve always been interested in science and scientific method. At university I studied Biological Sciences and Genetics.
After my degree, I worked at IQVIA – a healthcare/data sciences company – initially on the reporting side before segueing into product.
In time I transitioned into a Business Analyst role, supporting development of the ETL platform (“extract transform and load”). Software tickles my logical brain – lots of my job is about figuring out requirements and the logic behind how things should work.
After five years I was approached for the role at Protas, which resonated with me in that its focus on running a clinical trial was quite appealing to my science background and scientific interests. The fact it’s a not-for-profit as well as the Protas mission sounded great, so when they came calling, I said yes.
There’s an aura of positivity at Protas that I’ve not experienced anywhere else. Everybody is behind the mission, as cliché as that sounds! It’s something you feel at all levels, from the Exec Team through the organisation.
How would you describe the work you do here?
KH: If I could summarise it in one word, it would be “requirements”. I work on the Cantata platform. My job is to interpret requirements from stakeholders, ie anybody that uses the software.
Stakeholders will have in mind an idea of how they would want an IT system to work. It’s my job to analyse those requirements, interpret them, suggest things that make sense and which are technically possible and then document those requirements so that our technical team can build the functionality that would deliver those requirements.
A big part of Protas’ mission is to leverage technology to make clinical trials more efficient and cost effective. My job is knowing which bits from the core platform we can leverage without having to change and which bits we might need to tweak slightly or build from the ground up to best support each trial.
The team works so collaboratively here, including with the technical architecture team at Slalom, our technology partner, to ensure we deliver the best possible product – and experience for partners.
What makes Cantata so unique?
KH: The unique benefit of Cantata is its seamless integration of the various different functionalities.
Other trials typically have individual, separate platforms to support the different elements of a clinical trial, such as randomising participants, housing the electronic case report forms (eCRFs) or managing treatment inventory, which can easily lead to data integrity issues.
In Cantata it’s all integrated in one platform. This ultimately saves a lot of money, reduces administrative burden and makes the whole trial much more efficient.
For example, before technology, participants would be given a rather long questionnaire, including exclusion criteria and medication they’re currently taking, which they’d need to fill in by hand.
Nowadays, it’s an online form, but Cantata has improved that even further by streamlining it and building in prompts and guides to help the user, which makes it easier to use and also helps preserve data integrity.
That’s just one example. The same principles apply to processes such as treatment inventory, the delegation of duties form, or out-of-the-box reports. With Cantata, all of these are electronic and streamlined.
What does being a Business Analyst mean with regards clinical trials?
KH: On a day-to-day level, it’s a lot about prioritisation and understanding the needs from stakeholders. As a team we work in what we call “sprints”, which is similar to a two-to-four-week cycle in which we develop a set of a piece of functionality.
I’m responsible for creating “user stories” which describe the different users of the platform and what needs they will have. I then write the acceptance criteria, which explains for that piece of functionality to be delivered what it should have achieved.
I also help plan for the next sprint, ensuring we have what we need in terms of requirements. Once the requirements are understood, I move them on to be designed by our technical architecture team.
A typical software development lifecycle begins with the design phase, which is what I am technically a part of, gathering the requirements for the platform. Next you have the development phase where the developers check the design and then write the code to build the functionality. Then you have the test phase which is checking that what we built works as expected and meets the acceptance criteria. And then once we’ve passed the test, we have release.
Having been involved in the Cantata build from the start, I have a decent idea of whether something is or isn’t working as expected. Post release, the front-end users may come back to us and ask for a new feature or a tweak in the functionality perhaps, so the cycle continues.
In terms of the bigger picture, I suppose it’s what you might call “road mapping”. I work with Jen Dumbleton, Product Owner and Head of the Trial Management Team, to map out what we might want or need to develop for future trials.
What does the future look like?
KH: We started building Cantata in January 2023 to support the Oxford Population Health and Boehringer Ingelheim EASi-KIDNEY trial on kidney disease.
The first participant was screened in August last year – which means we built an entirely new, game-changing platform in just 20 months. That’s a big undertaking. Now we have the base platform, we can roll it out to other trials quickly and efficiently. Our focus will be on continually improving Cantata and supporting new large-scale trials for common diseases.
Our CEO, Prof Sir Martin Landray, said that clinical trials “is a space which in many regards is in need of modernisation”. And that’s what we’re doing with Cantata – we’re truly modernising the clinical trials space.