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The COVID-19 pandemic has created unique and unprecedented challenges for the clinical research world, with potentially long-lasting consequences.
A new analysis of the extent of disruption shows that the average rate of stopped trials nearly doubled during the first 5 months of 2020, compared with the 2 previous years.
"Typically, clinical research precedes clinical practice by several years, so this disruption we're seeing now will be felt for many years to come," said Mario Guadino, MD, from the Weill Cornell Medicine, New YorkCity.
The analysis was published online July 31 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
The researchers used Python software to query meta-data from all trials reported on ClinicalTrials.gov. Of 321,218 non-COVID-19 trials queried, 28,672 (8.9%) were reported as stopped, defined as a switch in trial status from "recruiting" to "active and not recruiting," "completed," "suspended," "terminated," or "withdrawn".
The average rate of discontinuation was 638 trials/month from January 2017 to December 2019, rising to 1147 trials/month between January 2020 and May 2020 (P < .001 for trend).
Once stopped (as opposed to paused), restarting a trial is a tricky prospect, said Guadino.
