Appealing for efficient, well organized clinical trials on COVID-19

Abstract

Background: The rapid emergence of clinical trials on COVID-19 stimulated a wave of discussion in scientific community. It is important to understand the characteristics of the ongoing or pending interventional clinical trials on COVID-19., Methods: We reviewed the characteristics of interventional trials from Chinese Clinical Trial Registration (ChiCTR) and ClinicalTrials.gov. A total of 171 COVID-19-related interventional trials were identified on Feb 22, 2020. These trials are classified into 4 categories based on treatment modalities, including chemical drugs (CDs), biological therapies (BTs), traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) treatments and other therapies., Results: Our analysis focused on the issues of stage, design, randomization, blinding, primary endpoints (PEs) definition and sample size of these trials. Although most trials use parallel-arm design (88.3%) and randomization (77.2%), blinding is applied in only 25 trials (14.6%). More than half of the trials planned to recruit