Engaging patients and all stakeholders from the earliest stages of trial design is increasingly recognized as fundamental to planning and conducting high quality clinical trials. Yet important gaps remain, including a lack of comprehensive resources for engaging all stakeholders and a unifying framework, especially one tied to regulatory guidance.

To address these gaps, CTTI is starting work on a new project that will result in an engagement roadmap, multi-stakeholder recommendations, and supporting resources for effectively and efficiently engaging all stakeholders in the design of clinical trials. This project aims to identify:

• Specific opportunities and high-value approaches/methods/tools for study designers to engage with internal and external stakeholders across the clinical trial design and planning process.
• Situation-specific considerations for ensuring engagement is appropriately equitable, effective, and feasible.

In carrying out this work, CTTI will conduct iterative design and evidence gathering activities, including a landscape scan, user-testing and formal research aimed at reaching consensus across stakeholders on suggested engagement, and one or more multi-stakeholder expert meetings to review and synthesize findings.

By taking a multifaceted approach, CTTI will create resources that will enable clinical trial designers to collectively and coherently use various existing methods to engage all stakeholders across the trial design process – leading to more efficient, higher quality research in alignment with CTTI’s vision for clinical trials by 2030.