Innovating Clinical Trials is a podcast that brings clinical operations leaders a thoughtful examination of the challenges shaping trial landscape. Liam and Ted cut through conventional wisdom to ask the questions the industry needs to confront and explore what it would take to answer them.
Each episode combines candid, expert-led conversation with unexpected analogies that reframe complex industry problems in a thought-provoking way.
What makes a truly high-performing team?Inspired by the precision of Formula One pit crews, where the difference between winning and losing is measured in milliseconds, Ted and Liam explore what clinical trial teams can learn from elite performance environments.Ted outlines six principles that drive high-performing teams: clear objectives, defined roles, mapped processes, and a culture of continuous improvement. Liam draws on his experience in professional sport to reflect on why teams that truly operate at that level are rarer than we think, and why clinical trials are no exception.The episode leaves listeners with one question: what if we did the debrief before the problem existed?
In Part 3 of 3, Liam and Ted continue their conversation with Frank Watanabe, CEO of Arcutis Biotherapeutics discussing work-life balance, building social capital, and management vs. leadership.The conversation explores leadership at a practical level, from building trust across remote teams to creating flexibility that allows individuals to balance work and life in a way that works for them.Finally, he outlines his vision for Arcutis and what “meaningful innovation” really means focusing on solving real problems that matter to patients and clinicians.
In Part 2 of 3, Liam and Ted continue their conversation with Frank Watanabe, CEO of Arcutis Biotherapeutics, focusing on what it takes to hire and build high-performing teams in high-risk environments.Frank shares how he approaches hiring beyond technical skills placing strong emphasis on cultural fit, risk tolerance, and the ability to innovate. The discussion also explores how to create a culture where people feel comfortable taking risks and learning from failure. From encouraging teams to challenge the status quo to fostering psychological safety through leadership, Frank outlines what it takes to build organizations that continuously improve.They also dive into aligning incentives, building a mission-driven culture, and ensuring that when a company succeeds, its people succeed too.
In this episode, Liam and Ted sit down with Frank Watanabe, President and CEO of Arcutis Biotherapeutics, to explore his journey from a Navy officer to a biotech executive and the leadership principles established along the way. Frank shares how his early experiences in the military and his transition into pharma and biotech influenced his approach to leadership, highlighting a key idea that defines his philosophy: leadership isn’t about authority, it’s about earning trust and loyaltyThey discuss how operating principles can become the “DNA” of a company, not just words on a wall, and what it takes to embed culture into everyday decision-making.
A patient in a database is not a patient in a trial. So why do we keep treating feasibility like a headcount?Fresh from a week deep in feasibility work, Liam introduces four characters who show up and cause chaos in almost every feasibility process. There's Spreadsheet Larry, who confuses a number with a truth. The EMR Oracle, who offers psychological safety dressed up as data. Prevalence Pete, who chases the sexiest percentage instead of the biggest addressable population. And Motivation Mabel, the patient who technically qualifies but simply isn't interested.Together in this episode, Liam and Ted make the case that real feasibility isn't about being right it's about being useful. Understanding the conversion funnel, knowing how confident you actually are in your data, and recognizing that patients are humans driven by trust.
In elite sports, races are often won or lost in the transition, and Liam and Ted argue that the same is true in clinical trials. Drawing on the precision of Olympic relay racing, they make the case that the handoff points between sponsors, CROs, and sites are where trials quietly succeed or silently fall apart.From recruitment referrals that never get followed up, to sites given the green light before they're actually ready, the gaps are rarely dramatic, but the cost adds up. The culprit, more often than not, is assumption over communication.Tune in to find out why fixing the handoff might be the simplest, and most overlooked way to run better trials.
The handoff points between sponsors, CROs, and sites are where trials quietly succeed or silently fall apart; the culprit, more often than not, is assumption over communication.
Ted Trafford has spent his career building, scaling, and optimizing the systems that bring life-changing therapies to patients. As Director of Business Development at Probity Medical Research, one of the industry's leading clinical trial site networks, Ted leads growth and serves on the corporate leadership team. During his tenure at Probity, the organization has grown from a single trial site to over 75 sites across the US, Canada, Australia, and Chile, with Ted serving in a senior leadership role throughout that journey.
That breadth of experience is what makes Ted's voice in clinical research uniquely valuable. With three decades in the industry, he understands the pressures facing sponsors who design complex protocols, the execution challenges CROs navigate daily, the resource constraints sites wrestle with at the ground level, and the role vendors play in the clinical trial landscape.
Ted is a sought-after industry speaker, known for his direct, engaging style and willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. As co-host of the Innovating Clinical Trials podcast, he brings candor, curiosity, and 30 years of hard-won insight to every conversation, championing practical solutions, honest dialogue, and a better clinical trial ecosystem for everyone involved.
Liam Eves brings close to 20 years of clinical trial leadership to Innovating Clinical Trials and a career arc that's genuinely unlike anyone else in the industry. Before building and running Site Management Organisations, holding Executive positions at Contract Research Organisations, and advising clinical trial technology companies spanning remote monitoring, decentralised trials, and AI-powered precision medicine genetics platforms, he was a professional footballer at Burnley FC. That background isn't just a talking point. It shaped how he operates: fast, dynamic, results-driven, and comfortable making high-stakes decisions under pressure. He came to clinical research through neuroscience and psychology, starting as an assistant neuropsychologist before setting up a patient recruitment function and systematically working his way through every major discipline in trial delivery. He has also floated a company on the stock market and raised over £100 million, the kind of commercial credibility that separates operators from advisors.
What sets Liam apart isn't just breadth, it's what he built with it. He's led every major function in clinical trial delivery: patient recruitment, clinical operations, project management, data management, medical affairs, and performance metrics, a vantage point that gave him rare visibility into how the whole system fits together and, critically, where it breaks down. Under his leadership, teams developed processes that took trials from contract signature to data-lock in just 9 months, built a single super-site processing over 25,000 clinical trial visits per year, and sustained an enrolment rate of 97.3% across 7 years. Those aren't industry benchmarks, they're outliers. He also authored a book on systems thinking, the intellectual framework that underpins everything he does. All of it feeds into the conversations on this podcast: hard-won, operational, and built on decades of actually doing the work.
Tarini holds a Master's degree in Drug Development Science from King's College London and has over two years of experience supporting oncology clinical trial enrolment programmes. Her work spans patient funnel management, eligibility screening, and HCP engagement. She has also researched barriers within the pharmaceutical industry to improving health literacy and developed recommendations to strengthen the industry's impact. Tarini works with Liam and the team on initiatives to grow clinical trial businesses while producing the Innovating Clinical Trials podcast.
What challenges in clinical trials deserve more attention? We want to hear from professionals across the industry whether it is about enrollment strategies, regulatory hurdles, technology adoption, or operational efficiency.
Liam and Ted are always looking for the topics that matter most to the people doing the work.
