Naho Yamazaki, Interim Deputy Director of Policy and Partnerships.Trusted information about health and social care research should be available for the benefit of everyone. Registering a study on a publicly accessible database is one way of making sure this happens.
In the UK, any favourable opinion given by a Research Ethics Committee is subject to the clinical trial being registered on a publicly accessible database. Our audits, however, show that more than 10% fail to do so.
In January last year, we started to register clinical trials of medicines on behalf of sponsors, to move us towards 100% registration. We've partnered with ISRCTN, UK's primary clinical trial registry recognised by the WHO. Data that we collect as part of study approvals are sent to ISRCTN, unless we are given a valid reason to defer registration or told that the trial will be registered with another US registry, Clinicaltrials.gov.
Both these UK and US registries share each study record with the WHO’s clinical trials portal, enabling worldwide scientific collaboration. They also provide information about trials taking place in the UK to Be Part of Research, a service to help people find out about how they can take part in health and care research, one of the topics that we are looking at during our first ever Make it Public Week.
From 1 January 2022 to 1 January 2023, we registered 156 trials with ISRCTN through this automatic registration process, at no cost to trialists. We will continue to explore ways to streamline the process, based on feedback from researchers, and plan to expand the service to cover other types of clinical trials.