Are There Too Many Clinical Trials for COVID-19 Therapies?
[Thursday, April 30, 2020]

There are more than 1000 clinical trials currently ongoing to evaluate various aspects of COVID-19, creating a pressure for recruiting patients and raising questions about the negative effects of the over-competition. But that may not be a fair question to ask. With more than 3.1 million confirmed infections and 228,000 deaths, there is unique sense of urgency not seen in the recent history. Hence, there is an intense interest and dire need to explore practically any option to detect, control, manage and treat the infection. There are 639 clinical trials to evaluate various interventions for the COVID-19 disease, about 150 in the US. These number pale in comparison to most other common diseases. For example, there are more than 2700 clinical trial ongoing for breast cancer, more than 2100 in HIV, 7500 for cardiovascular disease, and so on. It is not the number of clinical trials that are ongoing but the urgency of finding a treatment that governs how many trials would be initiated by developers and researchers. Instead of worrying about over-competition, developers should design better trials based on robust scientific rationale and well-designed clinical operations to find participants for their trials. It is important to explore clinicaltrials.gov and several other COVID-19 trial registries that have been created in the last few weeks, to review the other ongoing trials for common endpoints, inclusion-exclusion criteria, and other operational aspects. Reasonable trial design and operational planning could help steer the trial in the right direction, recruitment-wise. This is too early to complain about too many trials competing with your patient pool. Although there are competing trials, so far there have been only a few with good news. On the contrary, not doing a clinical trial for fear of competition may be more harmful to our chances to defeat the disease than help. Afterall, no one knows which of the hundreds of options being investigated would ultimately succeed.