Leading institutions, including Cochrane, sign on to international platform which aims to accelerate medical research
The nonprofit organization Vivli launched a novel data-sharing and analytics platform to help researchers move faster toward new treatments and cures. This innovative platform makes it easy for researchers worldwide to discover, share and analyze data from clinical trials, regardless of who sponsored the research or where the research took place.
The Vivli platform launches at a crucial time in the evolution of science. Increasingly, researchers are being required to make their data openly available. New guidelines issued this month by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors demand that researchers share the data underlying their published results. Government and non-profit research funders are stipulating data-sharing as a condition of their grants. The culture within industry is also shifting to reward more open sharing of data. The Vivli platform boosts these emergent data-sharing efforts by bringing data from all clinical trials together in one place.
“To this day, much of the world’s clinical trial data is not shared, and even when it is shared, it is not integrated across the entire clinical research ecosystem,” said Vivli’s Executive Director Rebecca Li, PhD. “Vivli acts as bridge, enabling researchers of every stripe across the world to build upon each other’s work and speed up science.”
Vivli provides researchers with a secure, easy-to-use online platform to store and share clinical trial data across all diseases, nations and research entities. Vivli also allows researchers to freely combine and analyze data from multiple trials using state of the art tools. This means researchers can validate research findings—from confirming a treatment’s safety to identifying side effects—and avoid duplicative studies, thus reducing costs and shielding research participants from unnecessary risks. The data can also be combined to ask new research questions, such as how a disease evolves over time, and gain information to inform the design of future studies.
Vivli evolved from a project at the Harvard policy center, The Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital to enhance access to clinical trials data. For five years, a group of volunteers embarked on a mission to define, design and launch a global solution for sharing clinical trial data. “Sharing clinical trial data is critical in order to move science forward. We owe nothing less to the people who put themselves at risk by participating in these studies that benefit us all,” said Li.
The Vivli platform was built with grants from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust. The platform is powered by Microsoft.
About Vivli
Vivli is a non-profit organization working to advance human health through the insights and discoveries gained by sharing and analyzing data. It is home to an independent global data-sharing and analytics platform which serves all elements of the international research community. The platform includes a data repository, in-depth search engine and cloud-based analytics, and harmonizes governance, policy and processes to make sharing data easier. Vivli acts as a neutral broker between data contributor and data user and the wider data sharing community. For more information, visit www.vivli.org and follow us on Twitter @VivliCenter.
Tuesday, Oct 9, 2018