Meet Dr. Sonia Quintas, MD, MSc, Medical Director
Medpace is proud to welcome Dr. Sonia Quintas, an accomplished and board-certified Neurologist, to our medical leadership team. Dr. Quintas brings nearly a decade of clinical and research experience across a broad spectrum of neurologic conditions, with deep specialized expertise in sleep disorders and headaches. Her background uniquely positions her to support complex neuroscience programs and to guide Sponsors through the nuances of neurologic trial design.
In this brief interview, we explore Dr. Quintas’ background and the distinctive perspective she brings to Medpace.
How does your prior experience and background translate to your work at Medpace?
Over the past eight years as a practicing Neurologist, I have worked at both a major university hospital and an outpatient private practice. This combination exposed me to a diverse and complex range of neurological conditions while allowing me to develop subspeciality expertise in the management of sleep disorders and headaches.
My clinical work has always been driven by my desire to improve patient outcomes through both evidence-based care and deeper scientific understanding. Treating patients in such varied environments helped me appreciate the real-world challenges they face and the limitations of current therapies. Research and teaching naturally grew out of that experience, enabling me to stay at the forefront of new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches.
At Medpace, I now have the opportunity to apply this dual clinical research perspective to support Sponsors from the very beginning of the development process. I can help shape protocols that reflect how diseases truly present in practice, anticipate operational challenges, and ensure trials generate meaningful, clinically relevant data.
What drew you to Medpace?
I was looking for an environment where I could further develop my research interests while leveraging my clinical experience in a more impactful way. In my daily clinical practice, I often encountered conditions for which available treatments or solutions were limited. At the same time, through my involvement in clinical trials and observational studies as a PI and sub-investigator, I began identifying opportunities to improve how neurological research is conducted.
What stood out to me about Medpace is the deeply collaborative, physician-led model. From early protocol development to site selection and ongoing medical oversight, physicians are directly involved at every stage. In this way, I can become an active participant in the entire process of developing various drugs that has the potential to help patients. This combination was not possible in the past from a clinical perspective.
What led you to specialize in Neurology, particularly headache and sleep disorders?
Since a young age, I recall wanting to understand the why of things. In fact, I believe this was the main reason I decided to study Medicine. However, contrary to what I initially thought, I soon realized that in many other specialties, the focus was on solving the symptoms, not understanding its cause. In contrast, Neurology is focused beyond looking for the cause of the symptoms. There is a genuine interest in understanding where and how a particular area of the nervous system might be malfunctioning. This is also true for headache and sleep disorders, which in my opinion make these sub-specialties particularly appealing, as they have traditionally not been considered to have a neurological origin due to the somewhat more subjective nature of their manifestations.
What excites you most about the current landscape of neuroscience research?
What is driving progress in neuroscience research today is the discovery of numerous biomarkers, both diagnostic and prognostic, that allow us to better characterize diseases that were historically treated as broad, catch-all categories. In the not-too-distant future, it will be possible to treat the cause of each disease in a specific patient with a targeted, personalized therapy, even before the first symptoms appear.
Sleep medicine is evolving quickly, what innovations or unmet needs stand out to you?
One of the primary challenges in sleep medicine, and in sleep disorder clinical trials, is the high degree of high intra-individual variability. They do not need to occur every night or with the same severity for the patient to experience a decline in quality of life. As a result, there is a clear need for new assessment models, both subjective and objective, that can evaluate this variability and thus provide precise tools to determine whether the drugs currently in development are truly effective.
Looking ahead, it is not unlikely that we will gain a deeper understanding of the pathophysiology of different sleep disorders. In many cases we are discovering that they are the consequence of another underlying process (e.g. REM Sleep Behavior Disorder (RBD) in alpha-synucleinopathies) which, as the true origin of the symptoms, will need to be addressed.
What should Sponsors be thinking about today to meet regulatory expectations in future sleep trials?
Sponsors should take a strategic approach to balancing objective and subjective endpoints, particularly in a field like sleep medicine, where subjectivity is inherent and clinically meaningful. Regulators are not expecting to eliminate subjective endpoints but rather provide a clear and well-justified balance between objective measures and patient-reported outcomes, with strong alignment between sleep endpoints and the proposed mechanism of action.
As new technologies and digital sleep measures are incorporated into clinical trials, emphasis should be placed on robust validation and interpretability to ensure innovation strengthens, rather than complicates, the regulatory narrative. This requires early planning, use of validated instruments, and a transparent rationale that clearly links subjective sleep experiences to tangible patient benefits.
Ultimately, success will depend on developing a cohesive endpoint strategy that reflects real-world clinical relevance and can withstand regulatory scrutiny.
Accelerating Clinical Development in Neuroscience
Drive your neuroscience trial success with Medpace’s well-established site relationships, operational excellence, and cross-functional, neuroscience-focused study teams. Our experienced neuroscience team leverages their real-life experience in a wide range of relevant indications and therapeutic platforms to support Sponsors in meeting the unique challenges of neuroscience clinical development.