Why does it take so long to complete a clinical trial? One bottleneck that many researchers face is enrolling enough participants to make the study statistically significant. On Monday (20 July), the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid -- aka caBIG -- announced plans to team up with the Susan Love Research Foundation to create a database of 1 million women interested in participating in clinical trials via the linkurl:Army of Women;http://researchers.armyofwomen.org/ website. These women, referred to as the Health of Women (HOW) cohort, can then be tapped by epidemiologists at will.
Image: National Cancer Institute
Normally, patient recruitment for a single study involves multiple recruiting clinics and doctors, and in some cases take years to complete. Here, researchers could solicit volunteers through Army of Women. After an investigator has contacted prospective participants, the study would undergo the usual institutional review board (IRB) oversight and receive informed consent from...




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