Why Great Research Sites Still Go Unnoticed
Before founding Corex, Dr. Lana Wahid spent weeks on the phone calling institutions around the country, looking for a specific research capability. She eventually found it much closer to home.
“The people and the resources we need are often already out there,” she has said. “The problem was never a shortage of good sites, researchers, or mentors. It was that none of it was easy to find.”
That experience helped shape Corex. Qualified research capabilities should be easier to discover and verify, but much of the information needed to understand an institution’s research strengths remains scattered. Some lives in public databases. Other details sit within departments or institutional records. The result can be an incomplete picture of what an organization can actually support.
Consider an independent clinician running a practice in a mid-sized city. She may have a patient population well suited to a rare disease trial, yet sponsors outside her existing network may never know it. Potential co-investigators could be nearby. The expertise needed for a federal grant proposal might exist within her broader research community. Finding those connections still often depends on who already knows whom.
Corex was built to make that information easier to find. The platform brings together researcher information from ORCID and other academic data sources with information verified by institutions to create reusable capability profiles. This gives institutions a clearer way to represent their research strengths and makes those capabilities easier for others to understand.
That foundation can also address a persistent challenge in feasibility. Institutions are often asked to provide the same capability information across different requests, even when those details already exist elsewhere within the organization. Corex brings that information into a more structured, reusable format, helping institutions present a consistent picture of what they can support.
The challenge extends beyond discoverability. Across clinical research, fragmented information and manual processes continue to complicate study operations. An ICON survey published in December 2025 found that 55% of respondents reported that site selection to full activation takes longer than five months. Site pre-selection decline rates also rose from 35% in 2021 to 47% in 2023.
The same fragmentation appears in day-to-day research operations. RealTime eClinical Solutions reported in 2026 that 76% of surveyed clinical research organizations still capture performance metrics manually or with only partial automation. Just 5% reported operating from a single unified platform.
If your institution, practice or health system does meaningful research work and wants greater visibility for its capabilities, learn more about the Corex Charter Institution Program.
Learn more: Corex Charter Institution Program
Sources
ICON plc. “ICON Survey Reveals Increasing Clinical Trial Startup Delays.” Dec. 2, 2025.
