Arthur C. Ouwehand
DuPont Nutrition & Health Kantvik, Finland

Abstract

In any scientific field, workers, whether these are scientists, regulators, or business people, try to understand where their field is going. A common tool is to check scientific publications to understand what are the advances in one’s scientific field. In industry one probably also follows the patent arena. Strictly speaking, these approaches provide us mirrors and tell what has been done in the recent past. Here, we present an additional tool to understand where the field is going. Clinical trial registries form an under used resource. Here we present a short view of what can be done.

INTRODUCTION

In any scientific field, workers; whether these are scientists, regulators, or business people, try to understand where their field is going. A common tool is to check scientific publications to understand what are the advances in one’s scientific field. In industry one probably also follows the patent arena. Strictly speaking, these approaches provide us mirrors and tell what has been done in the recent past. Here, we present an additional tool to understand where the field; in this case probiotics, is going. Clinical trial registries form an under used resource. Here we present a short view of what can be done.

Clinical trials are to be registered in a clinical trial registry. Although registries were originally intended for pharmaceutical research; to reduce the risk that ‘unfavourable’ research would not be hidden, it is increasingly being used to register nutritional trials as well. The most well-known registry is probably clinicaltrials.gov. However, there are many national and international clinical trial registries. Fortunately, the World Health Organization (WHO) brings most of these registries together in its International Clin ...