The Trial Bank Project has moved away from pursuing trial bank publishing to explore new research avenues for several reasons. It is now a global standard that clinical trials be registered at inception, in national registers like ClinicalTrials.gov. Dr. Sim led the WHO process that established such standard. There is now increasing activity to require results reporting as well (e.g., the FDA Amendments Act of 2007). And journals are deferring to the FDAAA process. A worldwide effort to make trial registration and reporting required means that setting up and running trial registers and results reporting websites has become an administrative and operational effort, rather than a research one. The real scientific opportunity is now in the sharing and re-use of human studies data for large-scale high-throughput computation of what we are calling the human studyome (the totality of all human studies worldwide). Our efforts are now aimed at collecting study information from as early in the study lifecycle as possible.

The Trial Bank Project's work is currently focused on two major areas:

  1. The Ontology of Clinical Research (OCRe), a reference ontology for the interpretation of human studies
  2. HSDBgrid, a caGrid-based architecture for federated data-sharing of human studies data using OCRe as the reference semantics, now with participation of 15 major US academic medical centers and increasing interest from UK and Europe

The applications developed by the Trial Bank Project are still available for inspection: