News

Together with the European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership  (EDCTP), ECRIN hosted a session at the Africa-Europe Science and Innovation Summit on 17 June 2021.  This session brought together key global health actors to collectively discuss lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and the next steps towards the comprehensive mobilization of all stakeholders for building sustainable clinical research preparedness and response capacities. It led to the development of 11 recommendations for capacity building and the development of a clinical research infrastructure in Africa.

The General Assembly of the Clinical Research Initiative for Global Health Consortium (CRIGH) went virtual for its 3rd edition.

The CRIGH Consortium was launched in October 2016, as a follow-up to a prior initiative of the OECD Global Science Forum, to establish a global framework to accelerate international cooperation in non-commercial clinical trials and to promote evidence-based medicine. To date, CRIGH brings together more than 40 international stakeholders across the clinical research value chain on five continents.

This free, self-paced, online course runs from September 1, 2021 to August 1, 2022. Graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, medical, dental, and pharmacy students, scientists, nurses, and other health professionals are encouraged to enrol now.
 

The Good Clinical Trials Collaborative has launched a 6-week public consultation on their guidance for Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs), ending 30 September.

ECRIN, the European Clinical Research Infrastructure Network, has launched the Covid-19 Marketplace. This new, online tool aims to facilitate and promote collaboration by providing access to planned and ongoing clinical trials, and to share trial ideas and questions in order to enable clinical researchers interested in the same topic to reach out and join forces.

The need for safe and effective COVID-19 treatments requires the capacity to conduct multinational clinical trials to test and compare existing and new therapies and vaccines. In light of this, the OECD published a Policy Response on 4 August 2020: “Greater harmonisation of clinical trial regulations would help the fight against COVID-19”.

The COVID-19 crisis requires researchers to join forces worldwide to find a cure and a vaccine. Sharing research data is a critical step in this global cooperation effort. ECRIN has launched a Clinical Research Metadata Repository, including COVID-19 data, allowing the discovery of clinical studies and related data objects, for example protocols, information sheets and consent forms, data management plans, statistical analysis plans, case report forms, results, publications descriptive metadata, etc. The Clinical Research Metadata Repository is updated regularly through collection of data from the most important sources of information worldwide, from New Zealand to the Netherlands and from Japan to Lebanon. 

Please visit the Clinical Metadata Repository at http://crmdr.org or visit https://ecrin.org/covid-19-taskforce for more information and details on all the services provided by the ECRIN COVID-19 Task Force. 

The  'European Joint Programme on Rare Diseases (EJP-RD)' has launched an online Support Officer offering, among others, Clinical Study support for clinical investigators preparing clinical studies on rare diseases. 

This paper presents the findings of a cross-sectional survey to understand the differences between ethics review systems, and how they could present obstacles for the promotion of international, collaborative trial by non-profit, academic organizations.