Probing California's Stem Cell Trials: New Tool Helps Public Navigate the Multi-Million Dollar Maze

Here's how the new clinical trial dashboard looks. You can slice and dice
the information by clicking on the black and blue boxes on the CIRM
website at the top of the page.

California's $3 billion stem cell agency this week is debuting a new, online guide to its burgeoning network of clinical trials aimed at  developing therapies ranging from acute myeloid leukemia to X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (X-linked SCID).

The new tool is called the clinical trials dashboard. It is a major improvement in making information on the all-important trials more easily available to the public, patients, researchers and policy makers.

Clinical trials, which have three stages and can last years, are the final step before a therapy can be approved for widespread use by the Food and Drug Administration. The agency plans to spend about $400 million on clinical ventures from 2017 to 2020.

The new dashboard cuts through the online maze and allows readers to sort by disease areas, investigator and institution, among other things. It also shows quickly the status of each trial, whether it is recruiting and takes the reader to a contact if he or she is interested in participating in a trial.

As the main dashboard page shows, the agency, formally known as the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), has funded 40 trials. The dashboard allows you to see which are still active and which are still recruiting. If you are interested in cancer and solid tumors, filtering them out is simple. Just click on the blue box on the dashboard.

Want to know which institution has the most CIRM-backed trials? The answer is UCLA with five, a figure easily arrived at by using the new CIRM tools. That goes for investigators as well. The dashboard can show you that Donald Kohn of UCLA has the highest number of trial awards with three. A bunch of others have two each.

CIRM has long had a vast array of information on its website. As with any website, that presents a challenge in terms of making the information available to public. First, the public needs to know it is there. Next, they need to be able to actually find the relevant information and find it relatively easily. Removing barriers to online access is critical. The online tools also must fill a wide range of information needs.  A cancer patient or researcher is not likely to be interested in plowing through reams of eye disease information in order to gain access to the relevant cancer data.

The clinical trial dashboard was built by Karen Ring, CIRM's website manager and a former stem cell researcher, along with contributions from numerous others on the agency's team. It is a major step forward in the agency's effort to tell the CIRM story and how it has spent the billions provided by California taxpayers.

Here is a video that turned up this morning as I navigated my way through the clinical trial dashboard. Another note: I did not encounter any bugs this morning, but Ring says she will be tweaking the dashboard and improving it in the next couple of weeks.