Working with psychedelics: Clare Knight
“I’ve always been passionate about creating a better mental healthcare delivery system with more effective treatments. It is essential that we widen opportunities for patients to join clinical trials to get early access to innovative treatments.”
Clare Knight joined the Clerkenwell Health team not long while ago as Senior Clinical Trials Manager. She believed the path to creating a better mental healthcare system with more effective treatments passed through psychedelics. Clare shares similar values that we hold dear at Clerkenwell Health: patient-centricity, inclusivity and innovation.
Clare, with more than 15 years of experience in conducting and disseminating social justice and applied healthcare research, was a senior manager overseeing the regional delivery of NIHR studies in the East of England. She also ran a large research programme at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge and worked on an early ketamine study in Cambridge and Peterborough NHS Trust.
“Clerkenwell Health combines a passion for innovation with a rigorous and ethical approach to conducting research. This allows us to offer cutting edge trials to people that are underpinned by principles of excellence in all that we do.”
Clare’s background in clinical and ethnographic research brings together medical and social sciences. Alongside her lived experiences with mental health, this enables her to have a more integrated approach to designing clinical trials that put patients at the centre of everything.
To make psychedelics accessible, she advocates, we need to start with making clinical trials accessible. The vast inclusion and exclusion criteria commonly used in psychedelic trials do not allow to explore how ‘set’ might be influencing clinical outcomes. She has observed many times how using an idealised patient does not translate to the best real-world outcomes. That is why she is keen on designing inclusive trials.
“Diagnostic categories are irrelevant – no matter what you call the disorder, the underpinning of them all is distress”
Clare is already managing our clients’ clinical activities from planning to implementation stage. Her deep understanding across a range of mental health conditions and associated standards of care puts Clerkenwell Health in a fantastic position to support a wider range of clients in the space.
For more information or interview requests, please contact:
About Clerkenwell Health
Clerkenwell Health is a consultancy CRO specialising in bespoke solutions for the development of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies.
The team brings together decades of international regulatory affairs, clinical development strategy, clinical operations, and market access expertise. They support clients by identifying suitable indications, engaging regulators, designing clinically sound and scientifically robust study protocols, putting together and running safety monitoring boards, and submitting scientific grant applications. www.clerkenwellhealth.com