The VCCC Alliance Investigator-Initiated Trials (IIT) Toolkit reached new heights in FY 21/22, with traffic to the freely available digital asset showing strong growth in every key metric.
The IIT toolkit accounts for over 15% of monthly website visits year-round, and last financial year was visited by 17,370 users, equating to a 28.7% increase in user traffic. It was accessed by users from 160 countries and registered 36,148 page views: an increase in total visits to the toolkit of over 26%.
Duncan Colyer, VCCC Alliance Senior Manager of Clinical Research, said the toolkit continues to fulfill the needs of researchers at many stages of their career.
“The IIT Toolkit is a fantastic and comprehensive resource for anyone involved in clinical trials,” he said.
“Resources that are both reliable and freely available can be hard to come by in the clinical trials industry, so we’re really proud to see such strong numbers, particularly those returning to the resource consistently.”
Initially a collaboration between the VCCC Alliance and the Melbourne Academic Centre for Health (MACH), with assistance from the Melbourne Children’s Trials Centre, the IIT Toolkit was launched in early 2020 to fill a gap and provide a suite of resources to support researchers conducting investigator-initiated trials.
Investigator-initiated trials (IITs) are established and managed by non-pharmaceutical researchers, such as clinicians and researchers working in a health institution.
The toolkit provides these investigators with a one-stop-shop for setting up an IIT, offering clear guidance for the trial team on roles and responsibilities and providing resources to enable adherence to regulatory requirements and best practice.
More recently, the toolkit has been updated to reflect new trial methodologies, including registry-based trials, as well as changes to the National Mutual Acceptance scheme as more states and territories have joined.
The VCCC Alliance Clinical Trials Innovations team is currently developing an education roadmap for registry-based trials, aided by the IIT Toolkit. The roadmap will provide an invaluable resource to researchers interested in establishing a registry-based clinical trial.
Importantly, the new resource will address the individual differences and nuances of registry-based trials, such as exploring the links between clinical registries and registry-based clinical trials and the data collection or pharmacy requirement for these trials.
