Technology company Oracle and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), are partnering to identify and screen volunteers who want to participate in COVID-19 clinical trials.
Earlier this month, the NIAID established the COVID-19 Prevention Network (CoVPN). Its goal is to register millions of volunteers for large-scale clinical testing of vaccines and monoclonal antibodies intended to protect people from COVID-19.
According to the NIH, the COVID-19 Prevention Trials Network (COVPN) was established by merging four existing NIAID-funded clinical trials networks: the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN), based in Seattle; the HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN), based in Durham, N.C.; the Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Consortium (IDCRC), based in Atlanta; and the AIDS Clinical Trials Group, based in Los Angeles. Those individual networks will continue to perform clinical trials for HIV vaccine and prevention and other infectious diseases in addition to their new COVID roles, agency officials noted.
As part of this recent initiative, Oracle developed a Cloud System called the CoVPN Volunteer Screening Registry to identify and screen volunteers who want to participate in COVID-19 clinical trials. Even though the system has been live for about a week, more than 100,000 people have already registered, officials noted in a recent press release announcement.
They added that this program is expected to support hundreds of clinical trial sites across the United States and internationally by the end of the year. The trials are inclusive of absolutely everyone from all communities, with a focus on those who are at higher risk for COVID-19.
The CoVPN Volunteer Screening Registry is the latest in a series of COVID-19 cloud application systems built by Oracle to support the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), healthcare providers and medical researchers. Taken together, these systems are designed to enable health professionals to collect and analyze the data necessary to better understand and combat COVID-19, Oracle officials noted.
Back in In April, Oracle developed a Therapeutic Learning System (TLS) that allows physicians and patients to record responses to certain COVID-19 drug therapies. In partnership with health systems such as Wake Forest Baptist Health and Javara Research, the initiative was extended to include patient monitoring. Participating patients can log their symptoms on smartphones giving healthcare professionals immediate access to early warning signs. Over 1.5 million patient updates have already been recorded in TLS.
Officials say that COVPN is a functional unit of “Operation Warp Speed,” a partnership led by HHS to invest in and coordinate the development, manufacturing and distribution of COVID-19 diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines. The network will use a harmonized vaccine protocol developed by the Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) public-private partnership. This will enable analyses of correlates of protection across multiple vaccine trials, officials stated earlier this month.
With the more recent vaccine announcement, “Oracle is expanding its cooperation with HHS to support the large-scale clinical trials required in the race for a vaccine,” officials said.
