Obesity clinical development has entered a paradoxical phase. Demand for trial participation has never been higher, yet obesity studies continue to experience some of the steepest attrition rates in clinical research. At the same time, the obesity treatment landscape is becoming increasingly differentiated, with sponsors competing not only on efficacy, but also on tolerability, persistence, route of administration and the quality of weight lost.

As a result, retention has evolved from an operational metric into a strategic measure of trial success. Sponsors can only demonstrate the full value of increasingly differentiated therapies if participants remain engaged long enough to realise it.

In this webinar, Michala Worrell explores the operational strategies that help sponsors protect retention whilst maintaining study momentum, including patient-centric protocol design, decentralised approaches, structured participant support programs and interventions that address GLP-1 tolerability during dose escalation.

Simon Bruce, MD places these operational considerations in the broader context of the evolving obesity landscape, examining how increasingly complex protocols, competition for treatment-naïve participants, active comparator designs and emerging therapeutic modalities are reshaping development strategy and study execution.

Attendees will leave with practical approaches for accelerating study delivery whilst maintaining participant engagement, data quality and retention in an increasingly competitive obesity research environment.