Making your study public before you start can be fun

On Monday I was finally able to start the clinical trial Everolimus for patients with relapsed/refractory germ cell cancer (RADIT), and I’m now looking forward to recruit the first patient. We aim to treat 25 patients with cancer of the testis with the mTOR inhibitor everolimus in this phase II trial, and eight German hospitals are participating.

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) requires, as a condition of consideration for publication in their journals, registration in a public trials registry. I registered my trial with Clinicaltrials.gov as NCT01242631. The registration process was straightforward, especially compared to all the other paperwork required for this trial.

The requirement for registration of clinical trials helps to prevent publication bias – meaning that negative results are likely to never be  published. Clinical trial registries make it unlikely that you will be “scooped”, as you know about the other studies addressing the same questions years before they finish.