The Ottawa Methods Centre (OMC) at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute has a 17-year history of conducting clinical trials locally, nationally, and internationally. Close to 1000 trials (50,800 patients), including 378 industry trials, have been initiated at The Ottawa Hospital in the last five years in numerous fields, including critical care, emergency medicine, respirology, infectious diseases, renal transplant, transfusion medicine, stroke, perioperative medicine, and perinatal health. The OMC has 21 scientists and close to 40 staff. OMC trialists have been at the forefront of innovative trial design, including pragmatic trials, early-phase translation, and cluster randomized trials.
OMC is also home to Office for Patient Engagement in Research Activities (OPERA) and the BLUEPRINT team. OPERA supports patient-oriented research through consultations, training, resources, and additional research to advance the body of knowledge in this area. OMC’s BLUEPRINT program develops novel approaches to designing and optimizing clinical trial protocols for early-phase or first-in-human trials to accelerate bench-to-bedside translation.
Finally, OMC counts the REthinking Clinical Trials (REaCT) program among its many successes. Pioneered by Dr. Dean Fergusson and Mark Clemons, REaCT is the most extensive pragmatic cancer clinical trials program in Canada, with more than 2,700 patients participating in 17 clinical trials at 15 centres in Canada.
