This blog is part of the Month of CIRM series on the Stem Cellar.

The questions we get most frequently from members of the public are about our clinical trials. Typically, people want to know what stem cell-based trials our Agency is funding or whether we’re funding trials for specific diseases or disorders that either they or their loved one are afflicted with.

During these conversations, we refer people to our website’s clinical trials page, which lists all of the trials CIRM has funded since our Agency was established in 2004. This page previously featured a simple table (see image below) that listed basic information about CIRM-funded trials including links to CIRM grants and to trial details on clinicaltrials.gov. This table was not the most exciting way to feature our clinical portfolio, but it did what it needed to do at the time.

Here’s where I reference Bob Dylan’s famous lyric, “the times, they are a-changing”. CIRM’s clinical portfolio has rapidly expanded from 17 funded trials to 40 since the launch of our Strategic Plan in 2016. That’s 23 new trials in less than two years. The number of CIRM-funded trials will continue to climb steadily each year as we strive to reach our Strategic Plan’s goal of funding an additional 27 new trials by 2020.

This rapid expansion in our clinical portfolio is very exciting because it brings us closer to achieving our mission of accelerating stem cell treatments to patients with unmet medical needs. It also means that it’s finally time to retire our old clinical trials table and replace it with something that does our expanding portfolio justice, and makes it easier for anyone who is interested to learn about the trials we’re funding.

That something is already here and it’s called the Clinical Dashboard. It’s an interactive Dashboard that allows users to filter through CIRM’s clinical portfolio by clicking on tabs for major disease indications. Users can also sort trials by disease area, investigator, organization, and the phase or status of the trial.

The Dashboard is a snapshot of the essential information a scientist, patient, or member of the public needs to know about our trials. Users who want to learn more about a given trial, beyond what’s listed in the Dashboard, can click on the arrow in the “Detail” column. This takes users to a detailed trials page featuring information about the treatment being tested, the CIRM clinical award that funded the trial, information about trial’s design, goals and patient enrollment status, and any recently published news about the trial.

The details page also has resources specifically for patients including a link for patients to contact the trial sponsor to ask about trial eligibility and enrollment and links to general information about stem cell trials on the CIRM website and from other organizations.

With our new Clinical Dashboard, we hope to raise the visibility of CIRM’s expanding clinical trial portfolio and to provide an all-in-one resource that is useful for multiple audiences.

Dr. Maria Millan, President and CEO of CIRM, concluded:

“CIRM is a global leader in funding high-quality stem cell trials for patients. We created the Clinical Dashboard for our website so that people can easily access important information about CIRM-funded trials and the promising treatments they are testing. As our Agency continues to fund new trials, we hope the Clinical Dashboard will prove to be an invaluable resource for patients, the public, and the stem cell research community.”