RTI Team Accelerating Research on COVID-19, Treatments

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Federal health officials have tapped RTI International to join a collaboration tracking COVID-19’s ability to cause severe illness and the effectiveness of proposed treatments.

The initiative, called  Collaborating Network of Networks for Evaluating COVID-19 and Therapeutic Strategies, or CONNECTS, is being led by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Medical experts at the Research Triangle Park nonprofit research institute, under the direction of principal investigator Sonia Thomas, Dr.P.H., and alternate principal investigator Tracy Nolen, Dr.P.H., will serve as the administrative coordinating center for CONNECTS, to ensure efficient operation of the initiative.

The RTI team primarily comprises individuals from the institute’s Biostatistics and Epidemiology Division Clinical Research Network Center with contributions from other researchers across the institute. Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., is a subcontract to RTI as the coordinating center’s science unit, led by Gordon Bernard, M.D.

“We are honored that our experienced team can contribute to this incredibly important effort to find effective treatments for COVID-19,” said Thomas. “This is a situation that requires unprecedented speed and collaboration, and one of the challenges of an effort this large is simply the coordination of the research. We look forward to doing our part to ensure that the clinical trials conducted as part of CONNECTS are done rapidly and efficiently.”

The interventions tested in CONNECTS clinical trials will focus on host-targeted treatments, which seek to limit damage to the body from the viral infection. Clinical trials usually test one intervention at a time within a single network of clinical trial sites. CONNECTS provides the opportunity to conduct adaptive trials across multiple networks. Researchers across these sites can test a variety of interventions simultaneously, sharing data and identifying the most promising treatments more quickly.

RTI and Vanderbilt will coordinate the development and implementation of master protocols focused on host-directed interventions relevant to the heart, lung, blood and cardiovascular dimensions of COVID-19 across the range of COVID-19 patient populations. 

CONNECTS is integrated with other NIH initiatives, including Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines and NHLBI Biodata Catalyst data, and is being conducted in collaboration with other federal efforts, including those of the Food and Drug Administration, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority and Operation Warp Speed.

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