Brain Cancer Trials Finder

Finds actively recruiting neuro-oncology clinical trials — glioblastoma, glioma, brain metastases, meningioma, medulloblastoma and others — across six public registers, and ranks them against a patient's age, performance status and disease setting with scoring you can read.

Three ways to use it:

	What it is	Data sources
Web page	https://prazg.github.io/brain_trials_finder/	ClinicalTrials.gov + ISRCTN live; EU CTIS and WHO ICTRP (India, China, Japan, Australia, Germany and more) from daily snapshots
Streamlit app	streamlit_app.py	ClinicalTrials.gov
Desktop app	Brain Cancer Trial Finder.exe, built from GUI_CLinicalTrial.py	ClinicalTrials.gov, plus deep links to CRUK / NIHR / ISRCTN

This is a search aid, not medical advice. Eligibility is decided by the trial team. Always confirm with the treating clinician and the trial contact.

---

The web page

It loads with a glioblastoma / United Kingdom search already run, so there is something on screen immediately.

• Diagnosis picks a synonym set (Glioblastoma also searches GBM, glioblastoma multiforme, gliosarcoma) rather than a single string.
• Region filters by where the trial sites are, not where it is registered, so a US-sponsored trial recruiting in London appears under United Kingdom.
• Patient factors — age, KPS, newly diagnosed vs recurrent, prior bevacizumab — feed the match score.
• Every score is itemised. Each card lists what added points and what subtracted them ("Phase 2", "Maximum age 39", "Excludes prior bevacizumab"), so a score of 0 is explained rather than mysterious.
• Results export to CSV with the scoring reasons included.

How the three registers are reached

This matters, because it is the constraint the whole design is built around. GitHub Pages serves static files, so anything live has to happen in the visitor's browser, and that only works where a register permits cross-origin requests.

Source	What it offers	How the page gets the data
ClinicalTrials.gov v2	JSON API, Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *	Queried live from the browser
ISRCTN	XML API, reflects the requesting origin	Queried live from the browser
EU CTIS	JSON API, response pinned to https://euclinicaltrials.eu	Daily snapshot, docs/data/eu_ctis.json
WHO ICTRP	No API. ASP.NET search, no CORS	Daily snapshot, docs/data/ictrp.json
CTRI (India)	No documented API, no CORS	Via WHO ICTRP
ChiCTR (China)	Returns HTTP 405 on its search paths, no CORS	Via WHO ICTRP

Two things follow from this.

CTIS cannot be read by a browser. It advertises * on the preflight but returns its own origin on the actual POST, so the read is blocked. scripts/build_snapshot.py runs server-side and commits the result.

India and China are reached through WHO ICTRP, not directly. CTRI serves a PHP form that returned no records for the obvious POST field names and publishes no API; ChiCTR answers HTTP 405 to both GET and POST on its search paths. Neither sends CORS headers, so a static page could not read them even if they did respond. ICTRP is the WHO aggregation point both feed into, and its per-trial records carry registry, recruitment status, countries, phase, condition and full eligibility criteria. One verified route beats two brittle scrapers.

scripts/build_ictrp.py collects it. Current snapshot holds 152 trials across JPRN (Japan), CTRI (India), NTR (Netherlands), ChiCTR (China), ANZCTR, DRKS (Germany), IRCT (Iran), TCTR (Thailand), ReBec, PACTR, REPEC and RPCEC.

Records from ClinicalTrials.gov and ISRCTN are dropped from the ICTRP snapshot, since the page queries those live. EUCTR records are dropped too — that is the retired EU register, it duplicates one row per member state, and CTIS supersedes it.

Both snapshots show their build date in the interface, so nobody mistakes them for live data. The page also links out to each register's own search, because ICTRP mirrors national registries on their own schedule and a very new CTRI or ChiCTR entry can appear on the national site first.

Recruitment status is derived for two of the three

Only ClinicalTrials.gov publishes a plain recruitment-status field.

• ISRCTN has no such field in the API feed. The page uses recruitmentStatusOverride when the registry has set one, and otherwise works out open/closed from the published recruitment start and end dates.
• CTIS publishes no single recruitment field either. The snapshot derives it per member state from notification events — a country counts as recruiting when it has a START_OF_RECRUITMENT with no matching END_OF_RECRUITMENT or END_OF_TRIAL.

Both derivations are labelled in the interface rather than presented as registry-stated fact.

Duplicates across registers

The same study is often registered in more than one place — 5G-PEARL, for instance, is both ISRCTN88772403 and NCT07391215. There is no shared key, so the page flags likely pairs by shared study acronym or identical normalised title and says "possibly the same study as …". It never merges records. Both stay visible.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. It carries the register-specific traps worth knowing before touching the parsing code — the ClinicalTrials.gov v2 field rename, where ISRCTN actually keeps its eligibility fields, the CTIS preflight that lies about CORS, and ICTRP's paging window.

npm install
npm test            # ten scenarios across all six sources
npm run serve       # http://localhost:8000

Local development

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate          # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
streamlit run streamlit_app.py

The web page needs no build step, but open it over HTTP rather than file:// so the snapshot fetch resolves:

python -m http.server -d docs 8000
# http://localhost:8000

---

Files

docs/index.html                      the web page — no build, no dependencies
docs/data/eu_ctis.json               EU CTIS snapshot, rebuilt daily
docs/data/ictrp.json                 WHO ICTRP snapshot (India, China, others)
scripts/build_snapshot.py            builds the CTIS snapshot
scripts/build_ictrp.py               builds the ICTRP snapshot, resumable
test/page.test.mjs                   integration test, runs the real page
.github/workflows/refresh-trials.yml refresh + deploy
ctgov_client.py                      shared ClinicalTrials.gov client and scoring
uk_sources.py                        UK aggregation over ClinicalTrials.gov
streamlit_app.py                     Streamlit entrypoint
GUI_CLinicalTrial.py                 desktop/Streamlit app body

---

Known limits

• The match score is a heuristic over free-text eligibility criteria, not a structured eligibility check. Treat it as a sort order, not a screening decision.
• CTIS publishes no eligibility criteria in its public feed, so CTIS records are scored on title, condition and phase only. Cards say so.
• ISRCTN returns up to 100 records per query and the page does not page past that. For glioblastoma the register holds far fewer, so this has not bitten yet.
• ICTRP publishes no age fields in its 24-element public record, so those trials are scored without an age check. Cards say when criteria are missing.
• Chinese coverage of glioblastoma specifically is thin, because ChiCTR entries tend to be indexed under "glioma" rather than "glioblastoma". Searching Glioma (any grade) surfaces considerably more.
• Register coverage overlaps and is incomplete. A trial absent here may still exist. The retired EudraCT register is deliberately excluded.

Licence and credit

Apache-2.0. Copyright Prajwal Ghimire 2026.