Medical research funders worldwide commit to boosting clinical trial reporting

Fourteen funding bodies from around the world have committed to improving clinical trial registration and reporting.

The signatories include two major East Asian funders that appear to be publicly committing themselves to trial transparency for the first time:

• Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development

• National Institute of Health, Republic of Korea

The trial transparency commitments are included in the wider-ranging WHO-initiated “Joint statement on strengthening clinical trials 2025”.

Signatories “commit to adapting our policies and practice to support and promote” various measures, including:

"registration and update on trial progress in a publicly available, free to access, searchable, clinical trial registry complying with WHO’s international agreed standards and updating of registries to include trial results, working towards a timeframe of 12 months from primary trial completion (in line with the WHO Joint Statement on the Public Disclosure of Results)”

There is some overlap of signatories with the previous 2017 WHO Joint Statement on the Public Disclosure of Results, which sets out similar transparency benchmarks in more detail. For example, Wellcome Trust has signed up to both documents.

How are funders performing today?

TranspariMED volunteers followed up on the 2017 statement with three studies assessing funders’ actual policies and practices:

• By 2022, major funders in Europe had on average implemented only 36% of the WHO-recommended items, rising to 49% a year later.

• A 2024 study of top medical research funders in the USA found that funders had only adopted 37% of WHO items on average.

The steep increase in Europe from 2022 to 2023 was probably driven by TranspariMED’s direct outreach to those funders, which reminded them of WHO best practices and flagged existing policy gaps. (Not all of the funders assessed had actively signed up to the statement, but none questioned its relevance.)

Some funders have simply broken their past promises. For example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation signed up to the 2017 statement, but subsequently failed to honour its commitments and has consistently refused to engage with TranspariMED on the issue. (Gates Foundation has not signed the new statement.)

Similarly, the Indian Council of Medical Research seems not to have delivered on its 2017 promises.

On the other hand, many 2017 signatories including Wellcome Trust and NIHR did take their pledges seriously and put into place strong policies and procedures.

Moving from words to action

Will the new WHO statement have an impact in the real world? It will depend on what funders and researchers do next.

Research funders:

• TranspariMED encourages medical research funders to use our “WHO best practices checklist for funders” and check out the funder case studies on our website.

• Funders should also consider joining the Ensuring Value in Research Funders' Forum (EViR) to exchange experiences and best practices with their peers.

Academic researchers:

• Researchers should assess signatories’ current performance, communicate gaps to them, and track their progress over time.

• Our past experience shows that such studies can be done in the framework of an ambitious masters’ project and published in high impact journals.

List of 2025 signatories 

The following funders signed up to the latest WHO statement:

1. ANRS Maladies infectieuses émergentes

2. Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)

3. Global Health EDCTP3

4. INSERM

5. Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED)

6. National Institute of Health, Republic of Korea

7. Nepal Health Research Council (NHRC)

8. Science for Africa Foundation (SFA)

9. South Africa Medical Research Council (SAMRC)

10. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)

11. UK Medical Research Council (UKMRC)

12. UK National Institute of Health Research (NIHR)

13. Wellcome Trust

14. German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR)