Cognitum Consortium
Background:
Professor Otavio Berwanger and collaborators from ICTU-Global (Imperial College London’s Academic Research Organisation) are co-founding members of the Cognitum Consortium. Other world class Academic Research Organisations (AROs) complete the founding membership: Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein (Brazil), the University of Cape Town (South Africa), the Centre for Chronic Disease Control (India), and RemediumOne (Sri Lanka).
Aim:
The Consortium aims to build better healthcare outcomes for our communities globally by bringing together global leaders in scientific and clinical excellence to design and deliver clinical trials and studies, while fostering and nurturing international partnerships.
Approach:
The Consortium approach is guided by the following values:
- Expertise: to lead by academic and scientific excellence, augmented by industry-level best practices and efficiency
- Truly Global: to bring together partners with subject matter expertise to complement each other - bridging science, geography and enterprise to deliver exceptional outcomes
- Excellence: to foster collaboration in clinical research by bringing together multiple “best in class” institutions
- Representative: to leverage low- and middle-income countries and ensuring studies are designed with the principles of ethnicity and diversity in mind
- Decentralised: to offer the flexibility of decentralised trials. Comfort, convenience, and efficiency are just some of the benefits of providing patients with decentralised trials.
Methodology:
The consortium consists of 6 founding member organisations who individually, and together, have proven expertise of running international clinical trials and studies. A Steering Committee consisting of the consortium directors and senior operational staff meet regularly to direct the group’s strategic activities. The team works to align operations with the consortium's overarching goals to ensure seamless delivery of global trials.
The Cognitum Consortium focuses mainly on Phase III and IV clinical trials. Phase III occurs before drugs or treatments are licensed and involves large participant groups affected by the target disease. The focus of this phase is to determine if the treatment is effective in patients, in diverse countries, over extended periods and often includes comparison against other possible existing treatments. If the treatment is deemed safe/effective, the treatment is licensed and Phase IV trials proceed, involving testing over extended periods of time in different groups of people, sometimes in combination with other treatments.
Cognitum’s core expertise is in cardiometabolic diseases, but the consortium’s expertise extends across diverse research areas with additional core interests in oncology, infectious disease, respiratory areas, emergency and critical care, and surgery and robotics.
Find out more about the work of the Consortium on their dedicated website and find latest news and updates on the Cognitum Consortium LinkedIn.
