We are happy to announce that OpenTrialsFDA was voted as one of the top 3 finalists of the Open Science Prize, thereby making it to the final round. During the public voting process (1 December – 6 January) over 3700 people from 77 countries participated. Alongside OpenTrialsFDA, the prototypes with the highest percentage of votes are MyGene2 and Real-Time Evolutionary Tracking for Pathogen Surveillance and Epidemiological Investigation. This top 3 will now undergo a final expert review process, after which the winner of the Open Science Prize will be announced in early March to receive the grand prize of $230,000.
The OpenTrialsFDA prototype makes clinical trial data from the FDA more easily accessible and searchable through a user-friendly web interface that you can now explore through fda.opentrials.net. Winning the prize would enable us to develop this prototype further in 2017, improving matching documents to corresponding trials on OpenTrials, along with extracting other valuable information from them. In the meantime, you can help us to get more FDA data on clinical trials available by rescuing ‘missing-in-action’ drug approval packages.
How to rescue “MIA” Drug Approval Packages
When OpenTrialsFDA carried out an automated download of all documents posted on [email protected], this not only captured Drug Approval Packages (DAPs), but also letters written by the FDA notifying drug companies that their drug had been approved for a new indication. Interestingly, this allowed us to identify drug-indication combinations for which DAPs were absent. Nevertheless, those DAPs do exist, and the FDA is obliged to make them available via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), for example in response to a FOI request.
In this blog by Dr. Erick Turner you can find out more on which DAPs are missing and how to make a FOIA request to the FDA to get them online. If and when you do make a FOIA request, please let us know by completing this form so that we can keep track of what DAPs have been requested.
Many thanks to everyone for their support during the voting process!