FAQs

The CIEL-Library aims to serve three purposes:

(i) a continuously updated database of immunotherapy clinical trials for all cancer diseases.

(ii) an exhaustive research resource to highlight gaps in the clinical research agenda and evidence base. 

(iii) a clinical decision support system, enabling clinicians and patients to match patient characteristics with individual trial characteristics to identify clinical trials for participation or for making therapeutic decision making. 

What can I use CIEL for? 

CIEL has two main features:

CIEL-Library is an exhaustive library of interventional immunotherapy trials retrieved from PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov. The user can search and filter based on trial characteristics (e.g. disease, treatment, or location). In the Library basic (e.g. title, registration ID) and design specific (Population, Intervention, and Comparator) information are shown for each trial.  

Match My Patient feature is designed as a simple clinical decision support system. Put simply, the user filter the trials (from the CIEL-Library) in a three steps process based on patient characteristics: The user first chooses between filtering for planned or ongoing trials (e.g. for enrolling a patient) or for completed trials (e.g. to find evidence and results); secondly, the user chooses the relevant disease category (e.g. ‘dermatology’ for malignant melanoma); and finally, the user can define up to five specific patient characteristics (i.e. cancer type, disease staging, number of previous systemic treatments, performance status, and location) to more thoroughly filter trials. 

What should I be aware of while using CIEL? 

Disclaimer 1: Funding for the project has expired. The database currently only contains trials assessing tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) transfer as immunotherapy and is not updated.

Disclaimer 2: CIEL does not appraise the individual trials’ methodological quality, such as assessing the risk of bias or highlighting important limitations, such as small sample size or selective results reporting. Thus, users should always be careful when assessing trials and interpreting their results.

Disclaimer 3: CIEL can only be as reliable as the retrieved published studies obtained from PubMed and the data available from ClinicalTrials.gov. Hence, missing, incomplete, or even misleading descriptions and results should be expected and taken into consideration while using CIEL. 

Disclaimer 4: Please note that some trials on the website may not have been manually assessed by a reviewer from our team. It will be clearly indicated for each trial whether data has been automatically imported or has been curated by a reviewer. 

How does CIEL work? 

The CIEL-Library is designed to be a continuously updated database of immunotherapy trials for any cancer disease. As of now, the CIEL-Library has two input sources, published scientific studies are retrieved from PubMed, and we also search the US clinical trial registry, ClinicalTrials.gov, for planned, ongoing and completed registered clinical trials. We have developed extensive search strategies to search these two resources. Records retrieved from PubMed are screened in the AI-assisted program ASReview, and data from ClinicalTrials.gov are semi-automatically imported through the AACT database data into our database. In the database, we also manually extract and curate information, which is then made available in the CIEL-Library. 

Where can I read more in-depth about the methods?

We are currently working on multiple scientific papers that will describe in detail the methods behind the CIEL-Library. We will announce these papers here on the website. Our codebook (i.e. the specification of each variable for our underlying relational database) and our extraction guideline (i.e. the manual for how each variable gets into the database) are available online on the Open Science Framework.

Can I download your data and use it in my own research projects?

Not yet, but it will come! We are working on making a download feature that will enable users to download the data for reuse in other research projects. In the meantime, feel free to contact us.

What are CIEL’s next developments?

The next immunotherapy options we aim to include in the CIEL-Library are chimeric antigen receptor T cells (CAR T cells) and therapeutic cancer vaccines.  

I am interested in this project! How can I get in touch with you? 

Fantastic, please send us an email! Find our contact information under About CIEL.