Developing sustainable solutions to fight COVID-19 and COVID-like illness

New drugs typically require years of research and clinical trials before they can be approved for use. Funded by the European Union, ECRAID-Prime’s multi-country adaptive platform trial in primary care will evaluate promising candidate therapeutic agents for the community treatment of COVID-19.

The ECRAID-Prime study is the first-of-its-kind multi-country, adaptive platform trial in primary care across Europe. The innovative adaptive platform trial design allows for the agility, efficiency and flexibility that is crucial for an effective clinical research response to newly emerging COVID-19 variants of concern and therapeutics.

The project is currently in search of compounds for phase 1 and 2 evaluation of safety and efficacy of candidate treatments for COVID-19, and possibly, phase 3 evaluation in the near future. 

Project lead Christopher Butler says, “Our top priority is to find newer and cost-effective treatments for convenient and early use in the community. ECRAID-Prime will select and evaluate novel approaches to the community treatment of COVID-19 and ultimately, help European governments and healthcare systems react faster and more effectively to future pandemics.”

The main advantage of an adaptive platform trial is the flexibility to evaluate several therapeutics simultaneously and in series, and by using advanced statistical methods, shared project co-coordinator, Alike van der Velden.

She explains, “The adaptive platform trial approach means we can add and drop treatment interventions quickly for futility, success, or safety reasons, making optimal use of research resources to the more effective therapies. This allows the efficient evaluation of several treatments, reducing costs, time to result, and minimising start-up times, which ultimately speeds up the implementation of new treatments.”

ECRAID-Prime is organised into Work packages (WPs), which form the backbone to realising our objectives.

Read more about our seven work packages and the people driving each topic.