Researchers have been unable to register trials with the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry for more than a week after a cyberattack.
Australian scientists are in limbo due to a cyberattack that has taken the nation’s major clinical trial registry offline for a week, leaving researchers unable to continue their experiments.
The Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ANZCTR) website has been offline since February 28, when the University of Sydney, which runs the registry, sent out an email announcing a “cyber security incident” had occurred on February 24.
Email recipients were told details including their password and contact information had been exposed but that there was “no ongoing threat to university systems, and no identifiable health data has been compromised,” as University of Sydney’s chief information officer Sandie Matthews wrote.
The ANZCTR is Australia’s most popular clinical trials registry and serves an important role. Scientific researchers are encouraged to publicly register trials ahead of time to “improve clinical trial transparency and reduce publication bias and selective reporting”. ANZCTR publishes information about the aims and methods of a trial (but has no role in managing the trial itself, which is why there was no health data exposed in the breach).
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Australia’s bible for ethical human research requirements, the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Research Involving Humans, requires human research to be registered “as a clinical trial on a publicly accessible register complying with international standards”. While it’s possible to register Australian research with other bodies, the ANZCTR is the Australian industry standard.
Without a functioning ANZCTR, researchers who were about to register or were in the process of registering their research are stuck. United of Wollongong senior research fellow Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz is waiting on the ANZCTR for confirmation of his trial’s registration before proceeding.
“Our ethics requires registration before patient enrollment can start,” he said in a message.
Meyerowitz-Katz notes that it is possible to move to another registry and that he might be forced to if the ANZCTR remains offline for much longer. “But ugh what a headache.”
On Monday, a University of Sydney spokesperson told Crikey they were working to restore the ANZCTR “as quickly as possible”. In the days since, there’s been no further communication with affected users or public updates from the university.
When asked for an update by Crikey today, a spokesperson apologised but didn’t give a timeframe for ANZCTR’s return.
“We’ll update the ANZCTR website with a timeframe when it’s available, and we’ll continue to respond to concerns about this disruption,” they said in an email.
