Marketplace for scientific clinical research on Covid-19

ECRIN 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 get in touch with clinical researchers interested in the same topic. The Covid-19 Marketplace is freely available for all scientific researchers working in clinical research, and in particular on Covid-19.

As the ongoing Covid-19 crisis requires researchers to join forces worldwide, sharing clinical trial ideas and research questions is a critical step in this global cooperation effort. Many clinical trials are registered each week, and as these trials are difficult to design, to execute, and are therefore costly, ECRIN decided to create a free, online marketplace where new and ongoing Covid-19 trials can be posted, and where scientific researchers can search for Covid-19 trials that are planned or already in place. Recent calls from the European Commission, such as Cohorts United against Covid-19 Variants of Concern and Vaccines & Therapeutic Clinical Trials to Boost Covid-19 Prevention and Treatment, state the need of an online accessible platform to share clinical trial questions and to find similar trials to collaborate with.

The protocol synopsis of the online marketplace for clinical research is based upon the ‘PICO’ trial characteristics (population, intervention, comparator, outcome). Further additional information about the submitted trial is provided in the rationale or in an attached document if available.

The research questions submitted are approved for inclusion in the database by the ECRIN team, based on their capacity to answer the medical communities need to advance Covid-19 research, and then made searchable on the Marketplace platform. The current Marketplace is the beta version of the platform, created to make Covid-19 trials searchable, as ECRIN continues working on updating the platform to address the needs of the clinical research community.