Durham, NC - Dec. 13th, 2018 - This week, iCAN visited the East Coast to discuss future projects designed to help infuse the pediatric patient voice throughout science, technology, research, innovation and advocacy. iCAN President, Leanne West and iCAN Director, Amy Ohmer met with Gary Furda, Program Manager, Pediatric Clinical Trials, Duke Clinical Research Institute. Sponsored by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the Pediatric Trials Network (PTN) is an alliance of clinical research sites cooperating in the design and conduct of pediatric clinical trials. PTN research provides evidence for optimal dosing of commonly used medications in infants and children, improving healthcare for these patients.
As Gary explained, PTN trials employ advanced techniques that make it possible to efficiently and safely study medicines in the youngest patients with extremely limited blood volumes:
Advanced pharmacokinetic modeling
Cutting-edge blood sampling methods
Leftover samples from other laboratory tests
Mining existing clinical data
And most importantly, every PTN study is closely examined to determine how to obtain the most valuable and generalizable results while minimizing the risk to participants. However, having support from the youth members of iCAN Research will also help in better understanding at the earliest stages of clinical research design, what most matters to patients and families.
With collaboration on upcoming projects, the hope is to improve the important work by PTN through sharing our values of increasing the pediatric voice throughout all facets of research. Watch for more to come in the future as we continue our partnership together.