The Benefit of Investigator-Initiated Studies

Segment Description: Steven Tong, PhD, associate professor at the Doherty Institute and the Menzies School of Research, discusses the benefit of investigator-initiated studies.

Interview transcript (modified slightly for readability):

Dr. Tong: "One of the other things was that this was an investigator-initiated study with 350 patients with Staph bacteremia and these are hard studies to do. We were really, really amazed by the engagement of all the site investigators in the community that were part of CAMERA 2, that we were able to deliver the trial on time and within budget, and the budget was about $2 million Australian dollars. To complete a trial of 350 patients with MRSA bloodstream infections, that's no mean task. We're very, very thankful for all our collaborators, all the site investigators—many of them weren't named on the slides—who put in extra time outside of their usual clinical duties to be part of this study and we had very little monetary reimbursement for them for that."

The study, “Combination Antibiotic Therapy for Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Bacteremia: The CAMERA2 Randomized Controlled Trial,” was presented in an oral session on Tuesday, April 16, 2019, at ECCMID 2019 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.