En route to international clinical trial transparency

Abstract

Substantial progress has been made since the Ministerial Forum on Health Research in Mexico when the notion of making information about a clinical trial publicly known before it had started recruiting participants was still relatively novel and unpopular. 1 The Mexico Statement on Health ResearchKnowledge for better health: strengthening health systems. http://www.who.int/rpc/summit/agenda/en/mexico_statement_on_health_research.pdfDate: Nov 16–20, 2004 Google Scholar Their call to "establish a platform linking a network of international clinical trial registers to ensure a single point of access and the unambiguous identification of trials" has now been realised. WHO's International Clinical Trials Registry Platform includes the WHO Registry Network and an online Clinical Trials Search Portal (CTSP) that allows users to search WHO's trial-registration dataset provided by registries meeting WHO's standards for quality control and content. 2 Sim I Chan AW Gulmezoglu A Evans T Pang T Clinical trial registration: transparency is the watchword. Lancet. 2006; 367: 1631-1633 Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (128) Google Scholar , 3 The International Clinical Trials Registry Platform. http://www.who.int/ictrp/en Google Scholar More than 72 000 records have been provided to WHO by registries in Australia, the UK and USA, and data from China, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands, and Sri Lanka will soon be added to this list.