Transparency needed in clinical trial recruitment performance

Despite the importance of site investigators to the success of multicentre clinical trials, inadequate public information is available about their recruitment performance. In this week's PLoS Medicine, Rafael Dal-R- and colleagues argue that that sponsors should disclose the recruitment targets of all site investigators on ClinicalTrials.gov before a trial starts, as well as their final recruitment. Information on issues that could have affected recruitment should also be provided. This information will be of interest to different stakeholders such as patient organizations, sponsors, and MCT networks, say the authors.

The authors state that: "Disclosing all site investigators' recruitment figures could prompt queries to the sponsor from the scientific community about regional subgroup analyses, to be able to assess if ethnic or standard-of-care differences have an impact on treatment outcomes."