Background: The current road to developing treatments for rare diseases is often slow, expensive, and riddled with risk. Change is needed to improve the process, both in how we think about rare disease treatment development and the infrastructure we build to support ongoing science. The National Institutes of Health (NIH)-supported Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network (RDCRN) was established to advance the diagnosis, management, and treatment of rare diseases and to promote highly collaborative, multi-site, patient-centric, translational, and clinical research. The current iteration of the RDCRN intends to build upon and enhance successful approaches within the network while identifying innovative methods to fill gaps and address needs in the approach to the rare disease treatment development process through innovation, collaboration, and clinical trial readiness.
Objective: The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the productivity and influence of the RDCRN since it was first established 20 years ago.
Design and methods: Using a suite of tools available to NIH staff that provides access to a comprehensive, curated, extensively linked data set of global grants, patents, publications, clinical trials, and FDA-approved drugs, a series of queries were executed that conducted bibliometric, co-author, and co-occurrence analysis.
Results: The results demonstrate that the entire RDCRN consortia and network has been highly productive since its inception. They have produced 2763 high-quality publications that have been cited more than 100,000 times, expanded international networks, and contributed scientifically to eight FDA-approved treatments for rare diseases.
Conclusion: The RDCRN program has successfully addressed some significant challenges while developing treatments for rare diseases. However, looking to the future and being agile in facing new challenges that arise as science progresses is important.
Keywords: clinical trial readiness; consortium; network; rare diseases; translational research.
A National Institute of Health-funded research network working toward better treatments for people with rare diseases The Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network (RDCRN) is a Federally directed research network that targets research to help investigators move closer to treatments for rare diseases. The network supports 20 different groups that study rare diseases. Each group focuses on three or more rare diseases and the research is conducted at multiple sites. Each group works closely with both the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and patient advocacy groups. The primary focus of the network is clinical trials readiness, which simply means knowing who to treat, when to treat, and how to treat, thus taking some of the risk out of clinical trials. This knowledge is gained through natural history studies. The network, supported by grants, holds a competition every five years to select groups to participate in the network. The RDCRN is supported by ten different institutes at the NIH. To date the RDCRN has published numerous manuscripts in topics ranging from findings from natural history studies and case reports to practice guidelines and clinical trials. To date the RDCRN has been involved in work that has led to eight treatments being approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
© The Author(s), 2023.