Consumer-friendly clinical trials information is here!

To the Editor: Cancer Voices NSW, a leading organisation for health care consumers, welcomes the coverage in the 18 April issue of the Medical Journal of Australia of gaps in and barriers to research endeavours into cancer. We particularly commend Olver’s editorial which, among other things, calls for more consumer-friendly clinical trial registries to play a role in enhancing patient recruitment by making it easier for them to find suitable trials.1

Cancer Voices NSW (http://www.cancervoices.org.au), the voice of people affected by cancer in our state, has long advocated for such a resource, both centralised and reliable. We are delighted to advise Journal readers that an initiative of ours, the Australian Cancer Trials website (http://www.australiancancertrials.gov.au), is now up and running. It has been publicly available since its launch by Professor Jim Bishop, Australia’s Chief Medical Officer, in November 2010 and is hosted by Cancer Australia. In partnership with consumers, the development of the project was led by a research team that included members from the University of Sydney, the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ANZCTR), Cancer Voices NSW and Cancer Australia. Consumers had considerable input to the website’s development through consultation with members of Cancer Voices NSW and Cancer Australia’s National Consumer Advisory Group. The Australian Cancer Trials website was funded by Cancer Australia with partial funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council project grant (grant reference number 512380).

The Australian Cancer Trials website’s consumer-friendly portal offers open access information held on both the ANZCTR and the United States ClinicalTrials.gov registers (http://clinicaltrials.gov/). It currently lists over 1000 cancer trials, and it is updated every day.

Consumers can do a “simple search” by cancer type or keyword or an “advanced search” using criteria including cancer status, trial focus, phase of clinical trial, recruitment status and age category. Information about each trial is displayed in a user-friendly format.

All cancer trials registered with ANZCTR in Australia for which a few consumer-friendly additional cancer fields are completed at registration will find recruitment easier. Patients with cancer and their specialists will have much easier access to up-to-date clinical trial information. This website is a successful model that can be translated to other diseases and conditions, and indeed, generically.