Hope Leman of Significant Science is a research information technologist for a health network in Oregon. She is also Web administrator of the grants and scholarship listing service, ScanGrants www.scangrants.com.

She is also a 2009 graduate of the Master of Library and Information Science program of the University of Pittsburgh and one of my favorite people.

Helping Patients, Helping Researchers: A Talk With Chris Trizna of MyClinicalTrial.com

Before we begin, Chris, I’d like to provide readers with some background about how I learned about you and why I think they will find this interview useful reading.

I envision several audiences for this interview. First, your comments may be helpful to members of the general public who may have heard the term “clinical trial” but who don’t really have a handle on this rather complex subject and who are the kinds of people likely to be interested by what you are doing at MyClinicalTrial.com.

A second potential audience may be members of the public recently diagnosed with a serious illness like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis–also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease–or who have a condition like Parkinson Disease who are either hoping to find treatment for themselves or who simply want to advance the cause of science and prevent others from undergoing the ravages of illness that they have known.

A third potential audience is that of people who are healthy but who would like to enroll as healthy volunteers in a clinical trial so as to help others by contributing to medical research by providing researchers with important information for comparison with people who have specific illnesses.

A fourth potential audience is that of medical people who may not be full-time clinical researchers but who are intrigued by or passionate about a potential treatment and are running a clinical trial perhaps for the first time and are not in a well-known, well-funded medical center and so need your help and expertise to recruit trial participants.

This all leads to my first questions. Have I gauged the potential audience and users of MyClinicalTrial.com about right? Have I left out anyone?

Yes, you pretty much covered it. We want to provide resources to those people that are just looking for an answer to their healthcare challenges. Not all medicines work for everyone and new trials may provide a solution to those people that fall into the percentage that are not successfully treated. Also, for those people that don’t have insurance to cover their medical needs, some trials can help them by providing medical screening, supervision, and study medicine.

Could you tell us a little about your personal and professional background and why you think MyClinicalTrial.com is important?

I have been involved with clinical trials for over 20 years. It really started back in college when I volunteered for different trials. Later in life I began to use my marketing experiences to help identify patients for clinical trials to speed up the clinical trial process. I think most people have some friends or family members that are affected by cancer or other live threatening diseases. I personally have lost family to cancer and have family and friends that are in cancer trials. One friend was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had trouble finding trials for her cancer. MCT is a great tool for helping doctors spread the word about their trials and for patients finding studies that match their conditions locally.

Let’s backtrack a little here so as to address the matter of how information about clinical trials is being disseminated on the Internet and changing the patient recruitment process. For example, I first heard about MyClinicalTrial.com by seeing a tweet that linked to this press release.

Now that in itself is a rather interesting sign of the times vis-à-vis the mix of social media and orthodox marketing. Could you tell us how you envision the employment of social media on MyClinicalTrial.com? For instance, is MyClinicalTrial.com on Twitter so that every time a new study is added to its listing a user would get a tweet?

We are 30-45 days or so away from setting up a Twitter and Facebook account. It would notify people of new studies and information about their conditions.

Read the rest of this entry »