The Fellows’ Pelvic Research Network (FPRN)

Excerpt

Clinical trials are crucial to the practice and advancement of medicine. Research studies are designed to answer specific questions about new drugs, devices, and therapies and to identify new ways of using known treatments. During the last decade, multicenter studies have become more common. Networks have been established in various fields to facilitate collaborative efforts to develop and perform clinical trials related to specific disorders, allowing more timely recruitment and completion of studies as well as increasing the generalizability of the results. In urogynecology, the National Institutes of Health has dedicated funds to two active multicenter clinical trial networks: (1) the Urinary Incontinence Treatment Network includes urologists and urogynecologists from nine centers across the USA; and (2) the Pelvic Floor Disorders Network, which includes seven US centers. Participating sites were competitively selected, and both networks are in the second 5-year cycle. Through high-quality research trials, both networks have successfully answered questions fundamental to improving health care for women with pelvic floor disorders [1, 2], and they continue to conduct multiple clinical studies simultaneously. …