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

The medical world has really stepped up in terms of collaboration during this pandemic, because we can work faster when we work together

The Result: Arthritis drug found effective in treating sickest COVID-19 intensive care patients.

November 2020.

Read more »

Meet Jess and Emma our Project Managers

 

Two smart, focussed project managers have joined Spiral recently. It’s very nice to have extra hands on deck to help deliver our Covid-19 projects.

Meet Jess and Emma our Project Managers for REMAP-CAP and for ASCOT-ADAPT.  You can read more about them over on our blog »

Coronavirus and how we play the adaptation game

We are busy adapting one of our biggest projects to collect data and eventually provide feedback on the best treatment for the novel coronavirus outbreak COVID-19.

Coronavirus mutated( or adapted) recently to give us SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 disease. Adaptation is a great skill for a virus – it's a pretty keen skill for people too, and we are using it to fight back against this disease ... read how »

The largest ever cardiac arrest trial performed in an ICU setting uses Spinnaker in novel ways!

January 2020 saw the last patient enrolled in the TTM2 Trial. Congratulations TTM2 – the largest ever cardiac arrest trial performed in an ICU setting!
The trial has been using our Spinnaker Platform in a novel way, which is what this post is about!

Back in 2017 we were approached by Principle Investigator, Niklas Nielsen, looking for a way to streamline the collection of data for TTM2 and a similar study, TAME.  The 2 studies had very similar data points to collect and there seemed to be an opportunity to save time by collecting data just once and sharing it across both studies. Very quickly it got more complicated than that. Patients could be randomised to TTM2, or TAME, or to participate in both studies. The big question was – could the Spinnaker Platform be adapted to this novel design?

We are very proud of our adaptability so we had a close look at what we could do ... follow the story on our blog »

DollyPartonChallenge

A bit of fun until next week

Congrats TTM2 - 1900/1900

Congratulations PLUS

Happy New Year!

Thanks for your support & have a great Xmas

Silly hats, Pavlova and sand between the toes - it’s that time of year again!
Merry Christmas from all of us at Spiral.

Thanks for your support - Spinnaker was used to randomise over 4,700 patients in 2019!

We are on holiday from the 21st of December and back on the 21st of January. You can check out our holiday hours over on our website »

Queenstown 2019 winner

The competition we ran for an iPad at the ANZICS-CTG WRF in Queenstown was very popular! Here are our top 3 and a worthy mention.

Our winning picture with the boat had the accompanying caption: Smooth sailing like #Spinnakersoftware #ANZICSCTG

See all 4 photos and captions via our blogpost »

Win an iPad at the ANZICS Queenstown WRF 2019

Spiral is going to the ANZICS-CTG Winter Research Forum in Queenstown!

We are very pleased and excited to support the ANZICS-CTG community and to attend the forum where we expect to learn more about the trials undertaken by the CTG.  Five of the trials listed on the program are, or will be, using the Spinnaker platform; these are Mega-ROX, Reactor, TARGET, TARGET Protein, and REMAP-CAP.

Cain and Audrey are looking forward to seeing you there!

... and look out for the competition - we will be giving away an iPad for the most relevant photo on Twitter. Competition details »

3000 patients in PLUS Trial

Security on Spinnaker

Spinnaker provides registered users with access to data they are genuinely entitled to see but if a user password is compromised, or there is a server data breach, there may be an opportunity for a member of the public to read private patient data.

Our aim is to keep your data secure, protect your patients privacy from outsider hackers and minimise inadvertent/naive mistakes made by genuine users of Spinnaker.

This is the first of a 4-part security blog that will outline how we do that and hopefully we can provide you with some tips to help you keep things secure too. To address security threats we need to be inwards and outwards looking with our security eyes!

Read more on our blog »

4 years on with CAMERA

Earlier this month I was in Melbourne when the results of the CAMERA2 Trial were shared with the Investigators and collaborators on the project.

This was one of our early projects and, 4 years on from implementation, it’s been interesting to see how Spinnaker stands the test of time.

Read more on our blog »

Christchurch

We weep with the families of each person shot in Christchurch and we grieve with our brothers and sisters in the Muslim Community. Te kaha kei roto kei te kotahitanga. Aroha nui.

Meet-up with these two smart fellows

Last week I grabbed a corner of Eastbourne cafe, Hive, and spent the day with these two smart fellows who are the real workers bringing you Spinnaker.

Read what we talked about »