Clinical Trials Ontario has launched QuickSTART, a $5 million program intended to let sponsors begin clinical trials in as little as 45 days in Ontario. The initiative is positioned as an accelerated study startup pathway that aims both to speed patient access to trials and to make the province more competitive for global trial investment.
The effort addresses a bottleneck that Ontario leaders have described as a drag on the region’s life sciences position. Bradly Wouters, chair of the Ontario leadership table for clinical trials, said slow startup times have discouraged global sponsors from bringing studies to the province while delaying opportunities for patients.
What the program changes
According to the launch materials, trial startup can currently take as little as six months for phase 1 studies and as long as 10 months for mid-to-late-stage studies. QuickSTART is meant to reduce those delays by creating a common process and timeline across research teams, institutions and sponsors.
The program also supports streamlined ethics reviews across more than 180 research sites. That matters because startup delays are often driven less by a single approval step than by coordination across hospitals, research institutions and industry sponsors. QuickSTART’s policy value is that it tries to standardize that coordination rather than treat every study as a separate institutional negotiation.
Early validation
The first pilot test was led by the London Health Sciences Centre Research Institute, which validated the 45-day goal by completing clinical trial startup in 20 days. Other participants in the first QuickSTART studies include Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Parkwood Institute, University Health Network, AstraZeneca and Roche Canada.
For sponsors, the signal is practical rather than symbolic: if Ontario can repeatedly approach the pilot’s timeline across a large multi-site network, the province could improve its standing in site-selection decisions where startup speed directly affects development planning.
