Cytel has been granted the Society for Clinical Trials’ (SCT) 2021 Trial of the Year Award for TOGETHER, an adaptive platform trial designed to expedite evaluation of nearly a dozen cost-effective COVID-19 therapies for low- and middle-income countries.

The multi-arm adaptive platform trial, which kicked off two years ago, used advanced statistical approaches to rapidly shorten the normal timeframe of a trial down to months, assessing eleven COVID-19 interventions in total. Within its first year, the trial was able to gather strong enough data to remove four interventions as viable treatments and determined that fluvoxamine was effective in cutting down hospital visits for patients with comorbidities, according to Cytel, a CRO and statistical software developer.

The trial is still actively recruiting for peginterferon lambda. To date, it has enrolled more than 6,000 participants at 22 Brazilian sites and is expanding to Pakistan, South Africa, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Vietnam.

SCT’s 2020 award also went to a COVID-19 trial, the University of Oxford’s high-profile RECOVERY, another multi-arm adaptive platform trial widely lauded for its success and innovativeness.