Cutting Through the Chaos to Navigate Coronavirus Disease Clinical Trials

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the world upside down, requiring humanity to slow down and social distance, and wreaking havoc on global markets. Medically the impact is sobering - the global COVID-19 case count has risen to nearly 500,000in the three months since the first case emerged last December, and 5%of infected patients are in serious or critical condition. Doctors are doing their best to make sense of the chaos, reprioritize, and address COVID-19. The virus’s alarming infection rate has made the urgency of response critical. But just realizing that the time to act is now is insufficient. Given how unprepared health systems are, we must also be coordinated and organized in our response.

In the world of clinical trials, researchers wanting to stay up to date on the latest COVID-19 vaccine statuses go back and forth across public and private trial data sources. But medical professionals need clarity if they are to be effective in a coordinated global response. The team at Inato built a solution to address the lack of one central and up-to-date resource of global COVID-19 clinical trials and trends.

Doctors grappling with fragmented data sources on COVID-19 trials can use Inato’s Anticovid Platform to get informed, organized, and to act immediately.

Inato’s Anticovid Platform gathers, organizes, and analyzes all COVID-19 clinical trial data in one open access hub. Anticovid presents these insights to hospitals and doctors at no charge in order to facilitate: 1) search and access for the most up-to-date COVID-19 trial information, 2) analysis and understanding of the emerging COVID-19 clinical trial trends, so that medical professionals can participate in or support in trials. More specifically, the Anticovid Platform enables:

1. Search for Ongoing Trials

Anticovid’s search function allows doctors to look up relevant trials in milliseconds, by recruitment status, therapeutic class, clinical and surrogate outcome, study type, and country. These filters support a multifaceted and most importantly, up-to-the-minute view of the 613 (as of March 26 2020) COVID-19 trials and counting. This is information that will empower doctors and research centers to design their next trial by evaluating registered trials to minimize redundancy, and by learning from existing trial designs to skip past having to work on trial design from scratch, and instead focus on innovation. Furthermore, this function will help doctors keep track of trials with a soon to be launched feature that sends an email notification for when a trial of interest publishes a result or update.

2. Analysis of Trial Trends

Anticovid’s analysis function, which is updated as new trials get registered, shows doctors relevant and emerging trends such as the number of trials registered over time.

For example, the platform visualizes a breakdown of the number of new COVID-19 trials registered each week, categorized by study type. Figure 2 below, shows that the number of observational studies have increased steadily and suggests that the critical need for more data on COVID-19 may be one driver of this trend.

\ In another example, Anticovid shows that in addition to traditional Chinese medicine, Chloroquine and antivirals are the most frequent interventions investigated in COVID-19 trials. The platform, as seen in *Figure 3* below, offers insights that winners may emerge from unexpected therapeutic categories, and highlights that combination antiviral therapies have been ineffective thus far.

These and more insights will support doctors in understanding how current trials are designed, what interventions they cover, and what results to expect as they design new trials. Doctors may also take advantage of these insights to evaluate whether they want to apply for upcoming trials based on their current capacity and qualifications.

The goal of Anticovid is to help doctors and hospitals optimize resource allocation and address unmet clinical research needs as quickly as possible. It is meant to help bring some order to the chaotic COVID-19 pandemic and support the important efforts to develop a vaccine.

Please share the platform with clinical research sites, hospitals and medical professionals who could use it in their work. Also feel free to email us with questions, comments or feedback on how we can improve the platform to address your research needs.

Photos by Inato Anticovid Platform, March 26 2020