Announcing the Expanding Access to Immunology Clinical Trials QuickFire Challenge

July 30, 2026 - Today, Johnson & Johnson announced the launch of the Expanding Access to Immunology Clinical Trials QuickFire Challenge. Innovators from around the globe are invited to submit their big ideas for tools, platforms, technologies, or methods with the goal to improve outreach, enrollment, and retention of participants in clinical trials focused on immune diseases in resource-limited communities.

The innovators with the most promising potential solutions aligned to this QuickFire Challenge will have the opportunity to receive award funding from a total pool of up to $350,000.^*

For innovation to transform health outcomes for people around the world, new treatments, devices, and technologies must be accessible, inclusive, and designed with the needs of patients and communities in mind. However, many patient populations are less represented in clinical trials, limiting the broader applicability of the research.¹

Barriers to trial participation are multifaceted and can include restrictive or noninclusive study design, logistical burdens, and a lack of scalable approaches to support investigator and site readiness in resource-limited communities.² Expanding local research capability through innovative solutions may help reduce barriers to participation, including by making clinical trials closer to where patients live.

Specific areas of interest include:

• Reimagining trial design through data, models, and participant-centered approaches, including:
  • Inclusive eligibility modeling
    • AI/ML-enabled redesign of inclusion/exclusion criteria to reduce unnecessary barriers
    • Model-informed simulations to predict feasibility, efficacy, and inclusion with a specific focus on resource-limited communities
  • Standardized, granular patient characterization
    • Harmonized phenotyping and endotyping across assets
    • Capture of site- and patient-level baseline data (comorbidities, prior therapies, disease heterogeneity) to enable broader eligibility and subgroup-specific insights
  • Participant-centered trial experiences
    • Integration of lived experience and participant perspectives into trial design and execution
    • Approaches to improve relevance, trust, awareness, retention, and long-term engagement
      
• Building the infrastructure, insights, and capabilities to operationalize inclusion at scale, including:
  • Benchmarks and metrics for inclusive trials
    • Novel tools and dashboards to measure outreach effectiveness, enrollment, retention, and site readiness
    • Comparable benchmarks across geographies and populations
  • Participant insights and real-world data (RWD)
    • Ethically sourced participant insights databases and RWD to inform outreach, trial design, and engagement strategies in immune-mediated diseases
  • Education, communication, and site enablement
    • Visualization and imaging technologies to improve understanding of immune-mediated disease processes for participants and investigators
    • Scalable training models for investigators and research staff in resource-limited communities to expand access and strengthen local trial capacity

Specific disease areas of interest include: Inflammatory bowel disease (ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease), rheumatology diseases (rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus and Sjogren's syndrome (SjD)), dermatology diseases (psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, and hidradenitis suppurativa), maternal-fetal autoantibody diseases (Hemolytic Disease of the Newborn and Fetal and Neonatal Alloimmune Thrombocytopenia (FNAIT)) and respiratory diseases (asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)).

The deadline to apply is September 18, 2026: https://bit.ly/ImmCTQFC

About Johnson & Johnson

Johnson & Johnson works across the innovative medicine and medical technology sectors to accelerate early-stage, transformational solutions by catalyzing the best ideas, wherever they are in the world. We do this by harnessing our deep scientific capabilities coupled with a wide range of tools, including customized deal structures, company creation, incubation and startup services, capital investments and other innovative business models that aim to meet the diverse needs of entrepreneurs, scientists, and emerging companies. Our goal is to help life science and health technology innovations thrive through collaboration and partnership with the global ecosystem, so that together we can change the trajectory of human health. Meet our passionate team of science and technology experts and learn how to collaborate with us at www.jnjinnovation.com.