CLIN-Net – The Hospital Care Network in ECRAID
ECRAID aims to establish the first sustainable European clinical research network for infectious diseases in Europe. ECRAID will develop into a ‘warm-base’ clinical research network that has the capacity and capability to directly enroll patients with infectious diseases into trials that will generate evidence to support testing and development of new diagnostic, preventive and/or therapeutic strategies and therapies; to conduct a broad range of rigorous clinical studies efficiently and rapidly; and to function as a platform for a rapid research response in the face of serious infections and infectious disease outbreaks. For this objective ECRAID will make use of the clinical network which has been built in COMBACTE over the last 8 years: CLIN-Net.
CLIN-Net’s role in ECRAID
CLIN-Net gained a lot of experience in setting up and performing site selection for clinical trials over the last years. CLIN-Net will therefore be put to use in ECRAID’s clinical research. The current scope of work for CLIN-Net in COMBACTE will be part of their role in ECRAID. The team will provide advice on the study design, protocols and practical experience and identify and select most suitable clinical sites based on past performance & study requirements. Additionally, the hospital network of ECRAID will be involved in more activities in protocol development, site monitoring, recruitement/retention strategies and informed consent, which currently is done by COMBACTE’s project managers for different clinical trials.
CLIN-NET, the extensive hospital network
Since the start of the COMBACTE project in 2013, COMBACTE-NET has been working to establish a high-quality clinical trial research infrastructure in the area of infectious diseases, in the EU and associated countries. By having access to contacts and data of emergency rooms, intensive care units and regular hospital wards for patient recruitment, CLIN-Net can efficiently select suitable sites to conduct clinical trials. In the past eight years, the CLIN-Net team conducted and supported 26 site selections and clinical studies with a network that has grown to now include more than 1,000 hospitals spread across 42 European countries. CLIN-Net not only performs site selection for the COMBACTE trials, but is also involved as hospital care network in major European projects such as VACCELERATE, VALUE-Dx and RECOVER.
ECRAID-BASE
On March 1st ECRAID (the European Clinical Research Alliance for Infectious Diseases)-Base was officially launched, followed by a virtual kickoff meeting that same week where the scientific plans and the management aspects of ECRAID-Base were presented. ECRAID-Base is the core set of activities of ECRAID.
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