Advancing the understanding, reflection, and translation of clinical trials: inaugural editorial to AME Clinical Trials Review

I am excited to announce the launch of AME Clinical Trials Review (ACTR), an open-access, peer-reviewed journal publishing commentaries on clinical trials in all phases.

Why launch ACTR? Tens of thousands of clinical trials are published every year, and the total number of published clinical trials in PubMed is nearly a million, with an additional 80,000 recruiting and not-yet-recruiting studies registered in the ClinicalTrials.gov platform. Underlying all of this activity is the critical need to balance solving medical issues while managing high economic cost. The sheer number of clinical trials that we conduct come with great expense but are essential for establishing clinical guidelines and policy. The leaps and bounds that have been made from the 20th century to the 21st century can be largely attributed to clinical trials. With this progress has come several challenges, such as the varying quality of a large number of clinical trials, selective reporting, publication bias, and conflicts of interest issues. Remarkable efforts have been made to address these issues, the notable of which are the Cochrane platform and its quality assessment tools for clinical trials and guidelines for clinical trial design and reporting, such as the SPIRIT (Standard Protocol Items: Recommendations for Interventional Trials) and CONSORT (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) checklists. However, readers still encounter challenges in understanding the vast number of published clinical trials, and only a few among this large number can be applied to the bedside or even to practice on a broad population. Despite the availability of a large volume of clinical trials, we are in urgent need of a platform to advance the understanding, reflection, and translation of clinical trials.

What is the mission of ACTR? The cover image of the ACTR shows a person standing in front of a painting, suggesting that different people may have different perceptions of the same painting, just as we may have different interpretations and understandings of the same clinical trial. ACTR aims to provide a platform to promote a freer, fairer, multidimensional, objective, and open review of clinical trials from scholars with different backgrounds to facilitate a more in-depth understanding of clinical trials. Moreover, ACTR also seeks to promote the generation of new ideas through discussion and reflection among researchers. All of these efforts are directed toward the single overarching mission of ACTR: to facilitate the process of moving clinical trials from benchside to bedside, and then to practice.

How will ACTR achieve its mission? First, ACTR will give priority to those cancers with the most severe global disease burden, such as lung cancer, breast cancer, gastric cancer, esophageal cancer, colorectal cancer, and liver cancer. Second, as every stage of clinical trials is crucial, ACTR will cover clinical trials from phases 1 to 4. Third, to uphold ACTR’s expectation of facilitating multiple perspectives and conducting free, objective, and fair reviews, at least two reviews will be solicited for each clinical trial of interest under double-blinded conditions. Fourth, to foster discussion and spark ideas, ACTR will invite clinical trial investigators to write response letters to the commentaries. Fifth, to maximize the impact of all of these opinions, multilingual promotions will be conducted, such as multimedia promotions in English and Chinese—languages with huge global reach. Sixth, and most importantly, none of the above endeavors will be possible without a dedicated professional team. ACTR is proud to have the most distinguished international advisory board in the field of clinical trials, a team of editors with extensive editorial experience and a highly specialized database of AME Peer-Reviewed Library reviewers. I am honored and privileged to take part in the foundation of ACTR. The team of editorial board members and I are ready to accept the challenge and responsibility of making ACTR a premier and professional platform that advances the understanding, reflection, and translation of clinical trials.

In conclusion, I believe that the mission of ATCR is achievable with the support of our best-in-class international advisory board, reviewers, authors, and readers. I look forward to witnessing the massive success of ACTR in becoming the preferred choice among the authors and readers of clinical trials.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Brad Li (AME Publishing Company) and John Gray for the language editing.

Funding: None.

Footnote

Provenance and Peer Review: This article was commissioned by the editorial office, AME Clinical Trials Review. The article did not undergo external peer review.

Conflicts of Interest: The author has completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form (available at https://actr.amegroups.com/article/view/10.21037/actr-23-2/coif). KZ is a full-time employee of AME Publishing Company and serves as the Editor-in-Chief of AME Clinical Trials Review. The author has no other conflicts of interest to declare.

Ethical Statement: The author is accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Open Access Statement: This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits the non-commercial replication and distribution of the article with the strict proviso that no changes or edits are made and the original work is properly cited (including links to both the formal publication through the relevant DOI and the license). See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.