ABSTRACT
Background: COVID-19 trials took <1 year to identify therapies reducing death in >30,000 patients but the Australian Placental Transfusion Study took >12 years to show that delaying cord clamping reduced death or major disability (cerebral palsy, severe visual loss, deafness, or cognitive delay) in 1,531 preterm infants. What can this teach us? Further, as composite outcomes of death or major disability can be inconclusive if each is unequally affected (as in the NeOProM Collaboration1) 2 important aims are (i) global co-operation (https://www.alphacollaboration.com/) to identify core Participant-Intervention-Comparator-Outcome questions for trials assessing mortality, a key outcome, and (ii) to answer those questions in much larger, faster trials. Such trials will also yield much more precise estimates of disability in survivors than was previously typical - a major benefit. Method: To inform these aims we compared enrolment in 2 COVID-19 trials and in 10 trials by IMPACT collaborators with samples >1,500 in high- or low-or-middle-income countries (HIC/LMIC). Results: The COVID-19 trials took 3-9 months, enrolling 13 - 219 per-site-per-year. Perinatal trials took 16-86 months, enrolling 5 - 1,700 per site per year. Trials in pregnant women or LMIC (n = 53,092) enrolled 5 times more than trials in newborns or restricted to HIC (n = 9,014). (Table) Conclusions: Greater international collaboration could resolve questions of shared relevance and priority more rapidly. Megatrials addressing mortality may benefit from highly streamlined processes for enrolment and minimal data collection, e.g., RECOVERY's one-page outcome form.