Castor provides free access to data capture platform to support non-profit COVID19 research projects

Amsterdam, Netherlands and Hoboken, New Jersey: February 17, 2020: Castor, a health-tech company that enables medical researchers to capture standardized data to support data driven medical decision making, announced that it will provide free access to its data capture system to all non-profit COVID-19 research projects.

On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the new airborne contagious coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2 a.k.a 2019-nCoV), that causes the disease dubbed COVID-19, a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. The WHO is providing technical guidance [https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/technical-guidance] on how to conduct useful early investigations and has highlighted the need to assemble large amounts of accurate and usable data as quickly as possible.

Castor has developed and made available ready-for-use electronic Case Report Forms (eCRFs) based on the WHO standard CRFs, to help researchers start their study or registry in less than an hour, ensuring they capture high quality data to help drive the global research effort.

By ensuring researchers capture standardized data on Castor’s clinical data platform, clinical data from around the world can be easily aggregated. This approach can accelerate the work of researchers who are trying to understand the virus and disease. 

Commenting on the initiative, Castor’s CEO Derk Arts, MD, PhD, said: “When novel strains of viruses like the Coronavirus emerge, data quickly becomes our most valuable asset. On behalf of the team, I am proud to announce that Castor is joining the fight against COVID-19 by making our data capture platform available for free for all non-profit COVID-19 research projects.

“A standardized approach in collecting clinical data is critical in order to better understand the natural history of disease and describe clinical phenotypes and treatment interventions (i.e. clinical characterization). For a global data collection effort to be truly successful, we need to go beyond standardized forms. The threshold for capturing these datasets should be as low as possible, to ensure anyone is willing and able to contribute valuable data.”

Castor encourages all non-profit COVID-19 researchers in need of standardized, high quality data to submit for a free billing code via support@castoredc.com, to start their studies by registering here, and to visit their online academy to become familiar with the platform. The WHO-defined CRFs can be downloaded here. [https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-ncov-crf.pdf?sfvrsn=84766e69_2]

Castor’s Electronic Data Capture (EDC) system enables every researcher worldwide to easily capture and integrate medical research data from any source in real-time, including clinicians, patients, devices and wearables. Researchers on the platform generate vast amounts of data from traditional and decentralized trials, and Castor recently reached milestones of 130,000,000 data points and 1,400,000 enrolled patients