With tears in her eyes, Lisa Harder describes her three-year-old daughter Ayla's favourite game: She'll jump onto her mother's back and pretend she's riding a horse around the living room, giggling so hard she almost falls off.
It's a game Harder might never have been able to play without her remarkable response to a new drug tested in a clinical trial at the University of Alberta.
Now Harder's life-threatening lung condition is under control, and her life expectancy has extended from just five years to a potentially normal lifespan.
"Clinical trials are vital, in terms of being able to develop new drugs and treatments for people who are really struggling, and give them hope," Harder says. "For me, now I get to worry about normal mom things like what Ayla's getting into in the kitchen, and not about if I can continue to be a mom at all."
A new collaboration between members of the Clinical Trials Alberta initiative, including the University of Alberta, the University of Calgary, and Alberta Innovates, with system co-ordination and alignment by Acute Care Alberta, aims to get Albertans like Harder into clinical trials faster, so they can access more innovative treatments.
"The pace of innovation around the world in fields ranging from cancer to genetics to metabolomics is faster than at any other time in history," says project co-lead Lawrence Richer, a pediatric neurologist, associate dean of research in the U of A's College of Health Sciences and centre director of the Northern Alberta Clinical Trials and Research Centre.
"I'm concerned that without this program, our capacity to test new medicines for safety and efficacy in humans could become a blocking point," he says. "We want Alberta patients to have access to the most promising developments as soon as possible."
The goal is to cut the time it takes for a trial to start signing up patients from the current 90+ days to 45, says Richer. A simplified master contract system and streamlined health-care system approvals, with clear steps for ethics approval, will ensure any trial, whether it's led by a pharmaceutical company or a university researcher, can launch smoothly in the province.
The Alberta Fast-Track to Accelerate Start-up of Clinical Trials (FAST) program kicked off with $322,000 from Alberta Innovates in the spring.
