ClinicalStudyDataRequest.com (CSDR), an online resource designed to allow researchers access to patient-level clinical trial data from more than a dozen biopharma giants, said today it launched data-sharing collaborations with The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Cancer Research UK, the Medical Research Council, and the Wellcome Trust.
CSDR said the collaborations with the four nonprofit partners will enable it to expand its services to researchers by adding academic-led clinical trial data to the patient-level clinical data already available from its biopharma partners.
Those 15 partners, according to its website, include Astellas Pharma, Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Daiichi-Sankyo, Eisai, GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Roche, Sanofi, Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma, Sunovion, Takeda Pharmaceutical, UCB, and ViiV Healthcare.
“Making clinical trial data available to biomedical researchers across all geographies will help improve academic and clinical research activities and the drug development process, and, ultimately, will enhance patients' health outcomes,” Scott Martin, chair of the CSDR Steering Committee, said in a statement.
Added Jennifer O'Callaghan, clinical data-sharing manager with Wellcome Trust: “CSDR addresses the needs of the academics whom we fund by providing them with a single, innovative solution for accessing and analyzing data from multiple trials as a means of saving time and effort—altogether maximizing the value of the research that we fund and creating an opportunity to make academic clinical trial data more discoverable, accessible, and reusable for optimal impact and value.”
Founded in 2013, CSDR enables researchers to access deidentified patient data from more than 3500 studies worldwide. Fifty-seven researchers who accessed data through CSDR have already published, or are pending publication of, journal articles on their findings.
Between May 2013 and February 28 of this year, CSDR said on its website, it has received 380 research proposals requesting access to patient-level data. Of these, 27 are in process, 41 were later withdrawn by the requestor, and five were said to have received no response.
CSDR recently launched a redesign of its website that it said was designed to allow for an improved, more efficient user experience. CSDR said its expansion would help address the call by both the FDA and European Medicines Agency for improvements around the scope, clarity, consistency, and usability of disclosed data.
