ECRAID-Prime Network training meeting

The attendees are part of Ecraid’s primary care network and represent their local general practitioners’ (GP) network in Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Poland, and the UK. They are responsible for the set-up and management of ECRAID-Prime’s platform trial in their countries. This includes overseeing trial logistics, selection of GPs, contributing to the central CTIS submission, communication with local study sites, and study monitoring.Clinical research in primary care is essential for the effective development and implementation of treatments in the community. In primary care settings, early interventions such as antiviral agents can be deployed to create a significant impact on public health. To ensure that treatments are effective and safe for the populations and situations that they are designed for, it is necessary to evaluate them in the communities where they will be used.

Project Lead Chris Butler (University of Oxford) began the meeting by introducing the ECRAID-Prime platform and emphasised the importance of performing research on the effectiveness of treatments for pandemics and epidemics in the community using innovative platform trial designs. He also underlined the common goal of ECRAID-Prime and Ecraid foundation: to establish a fully operational and research-ready clinical trial infrastructure that encompasses primary care, hospitals and ICUs to boost Europe’s pandemic preparedness.

The establishment of a flexible and scalable platform trial, such as ECRAID-Prime, is crucial for delivering trials quickly and effectively in the primary care setting. Chris explained that this means that when pandemics emerge, randomised evaluations can begin more or less immediately.

He stressed, “What we’ve learnt from past pandemics is that we should not have to set up a new trial from scratch every time a new treatment comes along. This is inefficient, time-consuming and wasteful of precious resources. Besides, clinical evidence generated from a trial set up during a pandemic is often not quick enough to provide timely treatments to patients within the same pandemic.”

ECRAID-Prime’s innovative and flexible platform design will allow new treatments to be introduced while the trial is ongoing. Current interventions can be dropped when there is sufficient proof of meaningful benefit or for futility. Conversely, in between pandemics, this trial infrastructure can be used to evaluate emerging treatments for other epidemic and endemic viral infections.

Project Co-coordinator and Trial lead (WP2) Alike van der Velden (University Medical Center Utrecht) elaborated on the various aspects of the multi-arm adaptive platform trial, where multiple interventions can be tested under a single master protocol. She highlighted that currently, the majority of clinical research focuses on patients who are hospitalised, with highly successful platform trials in taking place in general medical wards and ICUs. 

Ildikó Gágyor summarized the meeting: "I’m looking forward to working together to launch the ECRAID-Prime study in Germany and the other countries. When it comes to foreseeable roadblocks, I would say, strict regulatory challenges, but also capacity challenges for GPs due to their clinical workload and busy schedules. For this, we have piloted a 'flying study team' who will support our GPs with trial requirements such as administrative tasks and patient follow-ups. Our priority to keep our GPs engaged and motivated to continue driving primary care research.”