Stew Duff, who makes what we do at Spiral technically possible

He’s not a researcher signing up patients for life-saving clinical trials – but he does determine eligibility.

He’s not a doctor, or a nurse, seeing patients and delivering recovery results – but he does do patient follow-ups and reporting. 

He’s not on the front-lines, but he is helping to save lives from the back end.

 Meet Stew, one of our Developers »

Application barnacle scraping

Our developers have been engaged in "barnacle scraping" this week. 

Like the hull of a ship, software needs to go through periodic barnacle scraping, especially when we are making lots of changes and adaptations. Adapting our software platform for COVID research studies has pretty much become the norm for us. All those adaptations leave "barnacles" or little extras which are extraneous to the functioning of the platform and can slow things down. 

We can do all this while the software application continues to run so carry on as usual.  The changes we have been making will improve performance, speed up response times and make things smoother for you.

Thank you for your comments and feedback. 

 

Happy New Year 2021

 

This past year has been one for the record books! We just want to say how grateful we are for your support and we’re wishing you all the best as we enter a brand new year.

Head on over to our blog to find out what we are up to »

2020 Recap & Merry Xmas

2020 was a year of challenges, to say the least Covid-19 brought immense challenges to everyone in 2020, and it brought us our greatest challenge ever: adapting our Spinnaker platform to manage the world’s most complex clinical trial – a trial that tackled Covid-19 head-on.

A recap of REMAP-CAP: the clinical trial fighting Covid-19

As we speak the REMAP-CAP trial has over 3,500 patients enrolled, in over 15 countries, at 300 sites around the world. And during the year, our software randomised over 5,200 patients – go you awesome researchers! I want to take a moment to reflect on the real human impact. It’s easy to get caught up in technical details and statistics, but at the bottom line, the goal of the REMAP-CAP trial, and the Spinnaker platform, is to try and help real people who are sick – in some cases very sick – have a higher probability of receiving a treatment that will help. We feel proud to have been a part of a study with real-world, immediate impact.

REMAP-CAP milestones 

By February, we were already in the thick of adapting our Spinnaker platform to tackle Covid-19. It’s strange to look back to this article in Stuff in March about our work and read that we had just 50 Covid-19 patients enrolled in the clinical trial to investigate the best treatments. By April, our sprint out of the blocks had become a long-distance run, and we settled in for a marathon effort. Even now, in December, as we prepare data for analysis that will hopefully answer questions about COVID-19 treatment in critically ill patients, the finish line seems far away. But this year hasn’t all been about REMAP-CAP! Here’s a look at some of the other studies we’re excited to be a part of.

Updates on studies using Spinnaker »

News about the Spiral team – we’re growing, fast

An increased demand for our services has resulted in a doubling of the team at Spiral, and we’re so happy to have the new hands on deck for what looks like a busy year ahead. During the year, new team members Jess, Emma and Stew all worked on delivering our Spinnaker trial platform along with Cain, Craig and Anna. Jess also delivered... a new baby! The team at Spiral are distributed across New Zealand, and everyone was able to work from home during our lockdown. The only significant effect of the New Zealand lockdowns was to give us more hours in which to work! But it’s not all work for the team and in August, with travel restrictions lifted, we were able to meet up in Wellington for a few days of eating, working and having fun together.

Community Support

We are grateful for the organisations the help make our communities better places and we showed our appreciation by supporting:

• Innovative Young Minds. A nation-wide programme encouraging young women in STEMM careers.
• Books in Homes, Xmas Parcels and Reading Assistance in local schools
• Wikipedia Foundation.
• Wellington Free Ambulance.
  
  

Take care and enjoy this time with your friends and loved ones. Nga kirihimete, god Jul, Merry Christmas, from Audrey and all the team at Spiral