A new report on the activities and achievements of Clinical Trials Networks in Australia has been officially published and will be formally presented to the Clinical Trials Advisory Committee (CTAC) in Canberra today.
The report was commissioned by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and undertaken by ACTA to provide the first detailed snapshot of clinical trials network activity in Australia.
Thirty-four networks took part in the study which has shown that Australian clinical trials networks have together completed and published or initiated more 1,000 individual studies, involving more than 1 million participants and representing more than $1 billion in total research funding over the last decade.
This is a huge catalogue of investigator-initiated or "public good" clinical trials and large observational studies (more than 90% of studies were non-commercial studies) which includes more than 100 high-impact studies that have, or are likely to, change practice and policy both in Australia and around the world.
Australia has long been regarded as a world leader in the design and conduct of large phase 2, 3 and 4 clinical trials within a number of individual clinical disciplines. However, until now much of what is known about our national clinical trials capacity and expertise has been limited to the commercial trials sector.
This report will provide Government with a much better understanding of how important clinical questions are addressed through public good trials that are designed and conducted by networks that incorporate many thousands of practicing clinicians and researchers across Australia - many of whom conduct research over and above their regular clinical work.
"One of the recurrent issues that ACTA has faced in advocating for clinical trials networks over the past 18 months is that the essence of what a clinical trials network is, and the critical role that networks play within the health system, is generally poorly understood by policymakers.” Prof John Zalcberg (Chair, ACTA) said earlier today.
“This report will significantly improve our capacity to describe the sector and what it does, and will also form the basis of important future work to understand critical success factors for networks and to more accurately demonstrate the impact and return on investment that network trials deliver for Australians and our health system."
Another key finding of the report is a critical inability to accurately measure and describe key elements of investigator-initiated clinical trials activity in Australia including how trials are funded, where patients are recruited, timelines to completion and the direct impact these trials have on clinical practice or healthcare policy.
A large proportion of the data collated for the report needed to be hand sourced from multiple public records because most networks were unable to independently provide comprehensive aggregated data on their research and outputs. Poor access to central infrastructure support (or in some cases almost no central access to central infrastructure) for networks was a key finding of the report and one that ACTA hopes to work with Government to help address.
We once again thank all networks that took part in this landmark project, and acknowledge with much appreciation the tireless efforts of all members of the Steering Committee and Project Team and the support received from the NHMRC Clinical Trials Section.
A copy of the report is available here.
Follow ACTA on twitter @ACTAcommunity to see key findings from the report over the coming days.