Castor, a health-tech company that says it enables medical researchers to capture machine readable data to optimise medical decision making, is introducing its global COVID-19 monitoring and research platform to facilitate the rapid deployment of trials to test Coronavirus vaccines and COVID-19 treatments, it was reported on Thursday.

The company is now supporting more than 50 studies.

The firm's platform has an online enrolment portal for patients, an eConsent module, and a Symptom Tracker app, all merged with the company's Electronic Data Capture (EDC) system. This platform is freely available for everyone fighting COVID-19, including biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. The platform was designed to be rapidly configured and deployed. After an online enrolment and eConsent, patients and are randomised in the EDC. Depending on country protocols, vaccines can then be shipped to enrolled patients and administered in their homes. The real-time dashboards also allow study personnel to monitor the population and proactively reach out to patients who are showing symptoms of COVID-19. These patients could then be enrolled in further interventional studies or triaged in a hospital.

Alongside this platform, Castor is supporting research into the disease by providing free access to its research data platform for all COVID-19 studies.