Improving our competitiveness in conducting clinical trials

To improve Canada's competitiveness in conducting clinical trials, we must overcome a number of identified barriers, such as:

• lack of a common contract to facilitate research between researchers and industry;
• lack of harmonized ethics processes that permit timely and expedited ethics review of multi-centre trials; and
• lack of funding.

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 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).

At the first anniversary of the 2011 Clinical Trials Summit, ACAHO, Rx&D and CIHR have released a Communique highlighting progress and achievements since the Action Plan's release. Progress has been made in a number of areas, including the development of a model Clinical Trials Agreement for use by research sites and sponsors.

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 was provided primarily for members of ACAHO and Rx&D for pilot test purposes.