The FDAAA TrialsTracker is Back Online!

Keen observers with an interest in clinical trials transparency may have noticed that the FDAAA TrialsTracker, our website that tracks compliance with trial reporting law in the US, has not been updated for quite some time. Since February 2024, in fact. We’re happy to announce, however, that as of March 2025, regular updates have resumed. If you’re interested, a bit of detail about what happened is outlined below!

The FDAAA TrialsTracker was created and launched in early 2018. Since then a lot has changed! But for our purposes here, 2 very important things changed:

First, technology has advanced. Some of the underlying plumbing that goes and gets data from ClinicalTrials.gov every weekday, and processes it to determine which trials are required to report under the law, which are due to report, and if they reported, went out of date tossing a spanner into the works. Keeping software up-to-date and maintained in sustainable ways is important but often difficult work. Especially for academic software where this type of sustainable development, without a commercial angle, often isn’t valued nor funded. When your grant runs out, if you don’t have another way to fund the ongoing maintenance and development of the software, things like this can happen. Our wonderful tech team at the Bennett Institute does their best to keep the lights on but other, currently funded areas of work, need to take priority. However, we’ve now managed to find some time to pay off all of the tech debt and get things working again and plan to seek additional funding for the project moving forward.

Second, anyone in the clinical trial world will know that last year ClinicalTrials.gov got a bit of a facelift. The ClinicalTrials.gov modernization transitioned the entire platform to a new website. While all the data we needed was still there, it wasn’t necessarily where we expected it to be in the same way. This was a particular problem for one aspect of the system: we extracted information about results that are currently submitted, but not yet fully published, because they are in the ClinicalTrials.gov quality assurance review process, directly from ClinicalTrials.gov (not the full XML data dump which is where we generally get everything else we need, and was unaffected by the update). The scraper we built no longer worked and we needed this information to ensure consistent and accurate information appeared on the Tracker. Luckily, part of the ClinicalTrials.gov modernization efforts included a new API which also includes this information. We’ve now re-written the code to get these submission dates directly from the API which should hopefully be more reliable and more robust to any future website changes.

After addressing these two issues, we are now fully back online! We’re very pleased that, for now, we can continue to offer this service promoting transparency and accountability to the clinical trial world while also aiding institutions in monitoring their trials portfolios. We’ve already received a number of comments from users now that we’re back up and running. If you spot any issues, or have any questions about the FDAAA TrialsTracker, you can always reach us at bennett@phc.ox.ac.uk!