Abstract

Department of biotechnology, Govt of India, BIRAC, National Bio pharma mission spoored 6 sites to develop a hospital based clinical trial network (CTN) for improving research infrastructure. They had to recruit manpower, train them on good clinical research practices, develop and synchronize standard operating procedures and research infrastructure, develop a registry on medical retinal diseases including diabetic retinopathy, retinal vein occlusions and age related macular degeneration and start clinical trials. This poster highlights the important milestones in development of this Indian Ophthalmology clinical trial network (IOCTN) and the challenges that it faced in each step. This also highlights the methodology which we used to circumvent these challenges and to make the CTN robust.