Background: Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a pandemic-associated health emergency. Multiple preventive strategies have been implemented to try to prevent its transmission, and no drugs have proven to be highly effective yet. There are many ongoing clinical studies of COVID-19 and the information is scattered in each country’s own database.

Objective: To provide the insight of the ongoing COVID-19 studies and present the database information to researchers. Healthcare provider can follow these COVID-19 studies and prepare for the upcoming second wave.

Materials and Methods: The authors’ searched all COVID-19 studies that were listed in clinical trial registries worldwide and extracted information from each study. The authors’ reported these studies including study population, type of study, country of origin, treatment assigned in controlled clinical trials, and matched the date of registration to the real-world cases.

Results: Two thousand nine hundred forty-nine studies from 18 registries were found. Over 2,000 (2,224) studies (75.4%) targeted symptomatic COVID-19 patients, 387 studies (13.1%) targeted non-infected general population, and 237 studies (8.1%) included healthcare personnel. Clinical controlled trials were found in 1,491 studies (50.6%) and 1,346 studies (45.6%) were observational studies. ClinicalTrials.gov was the most prevalent registry, followed by Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR). China also had the highest number of registered trials. Antimalarials and antivirals were the most frequently used treatments in the controlled trials. The number of trials registered increased in parallel to the total number of real-world cases.

Conclusion: The number of ongoing COVID-19 clinical trials are steadily increasing. The present study provides an overview of registered studies from worldwide databases, which researchers can use to plan and conduct future studies.

Keywords: COVID-19, Clinical trial registry, Global trend

DOI: doi.org/10.35755/jmedassocthai.2021.05.12325

Received 18 December 2020 | Revised 16 February 2021 | Accepted 22 February 2021