The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the Norwegian Research Council, the UK Medical Research Council, Medecins Sans Frontieres and Epicentre (its research arm), PATH, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), Institut Pasteur, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust agreed to develop and implement policies within the next 12 months that require all trials they fund, co-fund, sponsor or support to be registered in a publicly-available registry.

These leading groups will adopt UN health agency's recommendations to register and publicly disclose results of all clinical trials they fund or support. 

Dr Soumya Swaminathan, Director-General of the Indian Council of Medical Research said, "We need timely clinical trial results to inform clinical care practices as well as make decisions about allocation of resources for future research.”

"We welcome the agreement of international standards for reporting timeframes that everyone can work towards," she added. 

Dr Marie-Paule Kieny, Assistant Director-General for Health Systems and Innovation at World Health Organisation said, "Research funders are making a strong statement that there will be no more excuses on why some clinical trials remain unreported long after they have completed.”

The signatories to the statement also agreed to monitor compliance with registration requirements and to endorse the development of systems to monitor results reporting. 

Most of these trials and their results will be accessible via WHO's International Clinical Trials Registry Platform which is a unique global database of clinical trials that compiles data from 17 registries around the world.