In an effort to boost the UK’s clinical trial sector, a British pharma industry group has recommended creating a metrics-based national clinical research dashboard to help increase the dwindling number of trials and promote innovative trial designs.

The UK’s methods for reporting clinical research performance are divided and its data collection is not unified, according to the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI), which recommended the UK set agreed-upon metrics for gauging performance (speed and efficiency, trial volume, quality, innovation and impact) to help track the impact of changes and trends on patients, the National Health Service and the economy.

The number of industry-funded trial starts in the UK has declined over the past five years, according to ABPI, to 440 (excluding COVID studies) in 2020 from 667 in 2017, a 34 percent decrease.

While the UK took the third spot globally (behind the U.S. and Brazil) as the country that initiated the most COVID-19 clinical trials in 2020, it ranked fifth in nonCOVID phase 2 studies globally, launching 201 of them in 2020; the U.S. launched nearly five times that number, 953, in the same year. And for phase 3 trials, the UK ranks just fifth in Europe, behind Germany, Spain, Italy and France, the report showed. It does still lead Europe in phase 1 industry-sponsored trials, though that number has declined.

The ABPI has called on the UK government to create standardized approaches and guidance for sponsors on innovative trial designs and trial delivery, as well as ensuring training is provided to ethics committees, regulators and researchers on such methods. The trade group also called on the country to more readily adopt digital tools that can support remote monitoring and virtual trial components, which were necessitated to keep trials running during the pandemic and are now being used more and more in clinical research.

Read the full report here: https://bit.ly/3mTor2y.