A new clinical trial search engine has launched to make it easier for patients to find studies and to help researchers recruit suitable trial participants.

MyClinicalTrialLocator.com uses publicly available information from the US government's clinicaltrials.gov site, and will be supplemented by “other information received from academic medical centres”.

The development of the free site has been supported and underwritten by US medical technology group the Biomedical Research and Education Foundation and the Bruce and Marsha Moskowitz Foundation, which provides health information and services.

One of the academic medical centres they are working with on the site is the Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University.

Its associate director of clinical research Charles Rudin said: “As the number of clinical trials increases, consumers need an easy way to target trials that are close to their homes or preferred medical institution, while researchers face increasing competition in enrolling enough trial participants to generate meaningful data.” 

MyClinicalTrialLocator.com offers researchers the ability to contact patients about enrolling in certain clinical trials and will eventually incorporate a planned social network, mobile applications, and the ability for patients with rare diseases to find one another and a clinician or researcher of interest.

Its launch comes hot on the heels of a similar new tool from online patient community PatientsLikeMe, which last month unveiled its own clinical trial search tool, complete with global coverage, location services and information from clinicaltrials.gov.

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