Trial Section

These trials are justified

NEW YORK - The Wall Street Journal reported sometimes the best hope for a person with a serious illness is to become a subject in a clinical drug trial.

Such trials are often hard to find, as they're rarely well-publicized. Also, doctors may not know about the best trial for a patient, because at any one time thousands of studies are being conducted around the world. As a result, finding a useful trial has usually required hours of intensive searching or having a doctor who's conducting an appropriate trial or knows other doctors who are - or plain luck.

Now, an initiative is making information from more than 88,000 completed and ongoing clinical trials searchable through a single Web site. In late March, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) and International Business Machines Corp. ( IBM ) announced the IFPMA Clinical Trials Portal they hope will enable doctors and patients to find potentially useful trials and to make more informed medical decisions based on past trials.

To facilitate this, the portal is designed to cut through medical jargon, correct misspelled search terms, and search for results in five different languages. "Clinical trials information is scattered all over the place," says Marc Andrews, director of strategy and business development for content discovery at IBM . "These trials have been conducted by multiple companies, and it's been difficult to find information needed to participate in trials relevant to life-threatening diseases," he says. "There was no one place you could go."

The new, free portal is powered by IBM search software called OmniFind, which pulls together disparate information to make it searchable, Andrews says. OmniFind is based on the Unstructured Information Management Architecture, a set of processing engines that sift through different types of data (PDF, text, and HTML files) from many different sources (i.e., databases and Web sites), to pick out the information buried within documents that best match the search terms.