Consortium Seeks to Enhance COVID-19 Trial Efforts

Betsy Ogburn

Betsy Ogburn, Associate Professor of Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

In an effort to “give some order to the landscape,” a new initiative called The COVID-19 Collaboration Platform (https://covidcp.org/) aims to help clinical trial professionals better coordinate COVID-19 efforts, says Betsy Ogburn, associate professor of biostatistics at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

To date, “only a few COVID-19 [randomized, controlled trials] have been centrally organized while hundreds of others are small, redundant, or may fail to fully enroll before the epidemic moves on,” Ogburn says. “Only by aggregating evidence across these trials will we learn about interventions for COVID-19 as quickly and reliably as possible,” she adds.

The online project brings disparate research teams working on the same clinical research questions together to share protocols, data, and evidence. The platform offers support for managing collaborations, including expedited and prioritized help from the Trial Innovation Network and SMART IRB to form multisite trials; expert statistical advice for aggregated analyses; and free data storage and anonymization.

All of the trials posted on the site are open to collaboration, and researchers are encouraged to reach out if they are interested in participating. According to Ogburn, several principal investigators (PIs) are actively looking to find additional sites to enroll subjects ASAP, and could benefit from partnering with non-academic medical centers, including PIs for projects described at https://www.covidcp.org/protocol/?id=rec8SsfeTwf3O3gsmhttps://www.covidcp.org/protocol/?id=recG3kF1XCawGShTZ, and https://www.covidcp.org/protocol/?id=reclXAITV2tFa9rtt.

COVID-19 Collaboration Platform partners include:

Author: Michael Causey