Grant: Operating Grant: SPOR Innovative Clinical Trial Multi-Year Grant

More than 250,000 Canadians are admitted to an ICU each year. While most survive, the mortality rate of 10% remains high, and survivors often experience severe long term disability and a reduced quality of life. Improved ICU care has come largely from using available treatments more effectively, than from the development of new drugs. But the questions are many, and available funding is limited. We will introduce a new model of a clinical trial - the platform trial - to Canada. Platform trials study several different questions at a time and use adaptive techniques to increase the odds that patients in the trial receive the interventions that are performing better. They are potentially more efficient and cost-effective than traditional trials, but they are new and untested. We will assemble groups of key stakeholders - patients, clinicians, researchers, and policy-makers - to study the opportunities and threats of the platform trial model. We will recruit 300 patients to an ongoing international platform trial that is building pandemic research capacity. We will use these experiences to design a Canadian platform to support the research activities of the Canadian Critical Care Trials Group - the oldest and most productive ICU research group in the world. The insights gained, and the research capacity created, will affirm Canadian research leadership in critical care, and lead to better patient outcomes in a learning health care system.