Improving our Competitiveness in Conducting Clinical Trials

Designing, implementing and funding multi-centre clinical trials is very difficult in the current Canadian context and Canada is losing its competitive hold. To improve our competitiveness in conducting clinical trials, it is essential to overcome a number of identified barriers such as inadequate funding for trials, the lack of a common contract template to facilitate research between researchers and industry, and the lack of harmonized ethics processes that permit timely and expedited ethics review of multi-centre trials. Of particular importance is the requirement to significantly increase the funding available to support well-designed research studies that address issues important to patients and their care.

Clinical Trial template agreement

The Model Clinical Trial Template Agreement (mCTA) provides a standard model contract for use by clinical trial sites and sponsors in negotiating phase II and phase III clinical trial agreements. The model is being provided primarily for members of ACAHO and Rx&D for pilot test purposes.

Clinical Trials Summit

To Your Health and Prosperity - An Action Plan to Help Attract More Clinical Trials to Canada is the result of the first ever National Clinical Trials Summit that took place on September 15, 2011. The Summit was co-sponsored by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Association of Canadian Academic Healthcare Organizations (ACAHO) and Canada’s Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies (Rx&D). The implementation of the action plan is now underway, and the partners anticipate releasing an update on activities to advance the plan in the fall of 2012.