COVID-19 Portal Will Provide Scientists Free Access to Completed Clinical Trial Data
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Vivli, the Center for Clinical Research Data, recently issued a press release announcing the launch of the COVID-19 portal, designed to enable the sharing of completed interventional treatment trial data.
Users of Vivli’s data-sharing and analytics platform can search listed studies, request data sets from contributors, aggregate data, or share their own data. Vivli has more than 20 members, comprising some of the most well-known healthcare and pharmaceutical companies. The non-profit organization aims to fuel collaboration by promoting, coordinating, and facilitating scientific sharing and reuse of clinical data, as scientists worldwide embark on a mission to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.
Technology Networks spoke with Julie Wood, Vivli’s Director of Strategy and Operations, to learn more about the COVID-19 portal and discover how researchers can access the data within the portal.
Q: Could you touch on the importance of scientific data transparency, particularly in terms of the COVID-19 pandemic? What are the implications of limited data sharing?
A: Sharing data from completed clinical trials means that information generated by participants of the trial, including those searching for treatments and vaccines related to COVID-19, are used and analyzed for more than just the original aims of that trial. It means that more researchers can review that data and find additional insights that increase our scientific knowledge and can help lead to new discoveries. If not all data is shared, we are only seeing a limited picture and that may lead us down the wrong paths of enquiry.
Q: Can you tell us more about Vivli’s global data-sharing and analytics expertise and elaborate on the aim, and launch, of the COVID-19 platform?
A: Vivli is a non-profit organization working to advance human health through the insights and discoveries gained by sharing and analyzing data. It is home to an independent global data-sharing and analytics platform which serves all elements of the international research community. The platform includes a data repository, in-depth search engine and cloud-based analytics, and harmonizes governance, policy and processes to make sharing data easier. Our platform, launched in July 2018, has almost 5,000 trials available for request and sharing from our members.
The COVID-19 portal will leverage our existing technology and make it easy for researchers to use a harmonized form to request and access the COVID-19 data. All member and user fees would be waived for sharing and access.
Q: How can researchers access the data within the COVID-19 portal?
A: Researchers would submit a request (which is an online form including the scientific question that would be answered with the COVID data) and then once reviewed, would be able to access the data either through downloading the data or through our secure research environment.
Q: What can be done to encourage and optimize data sharing between scientists, in both academic and pharma settings?
A: At Vivli, we are seeing more and more requests come from researchers interested in accessing data from diverse sources (academic and industry). We believe this trend will continue to evolve and grow. Our work is focused on ensuring that researchers can focus on completing their scientific enquiry, while the Vivli team does all that we can to manage the processes and agreements related to requests.
Julie Wood was speaking with Laura Elizabeth Lansdowne, Senior Science Writer for Technology Networks. Julie Wood also coordinated comment from other members of the Vivli leadership team.
