Praetorian Covid is a clinical trial that is executed in the fight against covid-19. As you probably heard, there are many trials going on at this moment. On this clinical trials website you can find them. Praetorian Covid is executed by the Radboud University of Nijmegen and it’s focusing on the medicine Valsartan. This is a medicine that is normally used to treat high blood pressure and heart failure. The purpose of the trials is to test if Valsartan prevents Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome which can occur because of covid-19. On the website of the Radboud University there’s an article in Dutch.

Patients that participate in the study are put in either a placebo group or the Valsartan group. Next, over the course of time, their hospital status is checked. Do they need mechanical ventilation, are they on the IC or have they lost the battle against the virus. For every patient this data is updated daily. Castor EDC is supporting this trial by giving the Radboud University the possibility to store their data in the Castor EDC web application. They asked me to develop a dashboard to show statistics about the 2 study groups. That’s my small contribution to this project:)

The dashboard is getting the data by using the Castor EDC API.  The frontend is created with the flexdashboard package in R. It’s showing a table with the statistics per group and for each group a plot in time of the number of patients that are either on the IC, need mechanical ventilation or have died. Since the trial has recently started, I can’t share results yet unfortunately. Hope to bring some good news about this later on!