The Engine of Innovation

May 15, 2025 
By Rebecca Handler 

Behind every headline-grabbing scientific discovery, there’s a powerful engine quietly humming in the background that is designing the trials, coordinating data, managing compliance, and making sure everything works as it should. At Stanford, that engine is the Stanford Center for Clinical Research (SCCR), and it has spent the last decade turning bold research ideas into real-world impact.

SCCR has just released its 10-year report, which Director Kenneth Mahaffey, MD says “marks a decade of growth, impact, and progress, and reflects our commitment to improving patient care through innovative research and collaboration.”

Founded in 2014, SCCR began with a simple but powerful mission: to advance impactful clinical research through education and high-quality operations. A decade later, SCCR has grown into one of the country’s most respected Academic Research Organizations. 

Founded in 2014, SCCR began with a simple but powerful mission: to advance impactful clinical research through education and high-quality operations. A decade later, SCCR has grown into one of the country’s most respected Academic Research Organizations.

It has supported more than 250 research projects and enrolled over half a million participants across everything from FDA-regulated drug trials to decentralized digital studies. While their work might not always be visible to the public, their fingerprints are everywhere in Stanford’s research enterprise.

The Foundation for Discovery

At its core, SCCR exists to make research possible. Its teams handle the full scope of clinical trial operations: study design, site coordination, regulatory compliance, participant recruitment, data management, and safety monitoring. In other words, SCCR ensures that ambitious ideas don’t just live on paper: They become real studies, with real patients, generating real-world evidence.

SCCR’s impact is perhaps best captured by the scope of their projects. From small, investigator-initiated trials to global Phase III studies, it has managed trials for cardiovascular disease, infectious disease, cancer, transplantation, digital health, and more. Their Clinical Coordinating Center supports both single-site and multisite studies and has developed a reputation for operational precision and scientific rigor.

Take the Project Baseline Health Study, for instance. Co-led by Mahaffey and the late Sanjiv Sam Gambhir, MD, this national longitudinal study tracked over 2,500 participants to better understand the transition from health to disease. Conducted across Stanford, Duke, and Verily Life Sciences, the study achieved an 85 percent retention rate, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. That kind of retention is rare and a testament to SCCR’s ability to keep participants engaged and research teams supported.

Responding to Crisis, Ready for the Future

When the pandemic hit in 2020, SCCR didn’t falter. Instead, it accelerated. Within months, its team launched ten COVID-19 clinical trials, enrolled over 500 participants, and conducted more than 3,500 visits. These studies helped pave the way for emergency use authorizations and expanded access to promising therapies.

Its work didn’t stop there. SCCR has played a key role in the NIH RECOVER initiative, one of the largest studies of Long COVID in the nation. With more than 1,000 participants enrolled at Stanford and SHC Tri-Valley, the team is leading several intervention sub-studies exploring treatments for brain fog, autonomic dysfunction, and post-exertional malaise.

The center has also helped pioneer a more accessible and participant-centered model of clinical research. Studies like REACT-AF, which uses smartwatches and app-based monitoring to guide real-time medication use, and the Stanford Heartbeat Study, which streamlines recruitment and screening through digital tools, are changing what it means to participate in a clinical trial. These studies don’t just collect data, they create research communities.

A Culture of Training, Trust, and Excellence

SCCR’s influence isn’t limited to trial execution. Over the past decade, it has quietly built one of the most comprehensive education and training programs in academic research. More than 260 training programs have helped prepare the next generation of clinical researchers, with onboarding, mentorship, and technical skill-building offered to hundreds of new staff.

The commitment to quality runs deep throughout SCCR’s operations. One of the most rigorous examples is the work of their Clinical Endpoint Classification team, led by Kevin Alexander, MD, which has reviewed and verified diverse clinical events encompassing chronic kidney disease, cardiovascular, and neurological endpoints reported during trials. This process, known as adjudication, involves carefully evaluating events like heart attacks, strokes, or hospitalizations to determine whether they meet the exact definitions outlined in a study’s protocol. It’s a crucial step that ensures results are consistent, unbiased, and scientifically credible, especially in large, multi-site studies where standards can vary.