Cuba celebrates International Clinical Trials Day with a hundred research studies

HAVANA, Cuba, May 20 (ACN) With 105 studies underway, the National Clinical Trials Coordinating Center (CENCEC), attached to the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP), participates in the control, design and conduction of research works currently ongoing across Cuba.

On the occasion of the International Clinical Trials Day, Selma Arteaga Canton, head of the Department of Attention and Control of the CENCEC's National Clinical Trials Coordination Network, told ACN that 43 of these studies are focused on cancer treatments.

As to COVID-19, she pointed out that from March 2020 to April 20, 2021, MINSAP approved 28 clinical trials to prevent and treat the disease. Four of them ended in 2020; the rest are still under development.

The phases of the trials related to SARS-CoV-2 are advancing at an accelerated pace without detriment to scientific rigor, since in normal times it can take about 10 to 12 years between the different stages and its administration on a population scale, he said.

Likewise, 46 studies have been registered to treat the virus, 14 of them from the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology and 10 from the Finlay Vaccine Institute. CENCEC participates in 22 of them.

Since 2005, and with the aim of highlighting the scientific work behind a vaccine or a drug for a specific disease, the International Clinical Trials Day has been celebrated every May 20, the day of the first trial of that kind in history. It was carried out by Scottish doctor James Lind in 1747, who paved the way for clinical research when he tried to identify the absence of vitamin C as the cause of scurvy affecting British Navy sailors.