Trial Jazz

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How it plays

Every dot is an interventional clinical trial registered on ClinicalTrials.gov. Its route runs through the cities where it enrolled patients. The dot leaves its first site on the trial's start date and reaches its last site on the primary completion date. Each kind of treatment is one line of the band.

Every bar of music, each running trial plays once. Trials close together in the bar merge into one held note, the way a run of subway trains does in Train Jazz.

What sets each note

Lines	By default each line is a modality, the type of intervention tested. "Lines by" rebuilds the band from phase, participants, countries, market status, sponsor or outcome instead. Each line has an instrument. By default the busiest lines get light voices (hi-hat, soft pluck, shaker) and the rarest get the distinct ones (trombone, celesta, organ), and a line with many notes in a bar plays each one softer. Change any voice in the lines panel. Your choices stay in this browser, and Reset goes back to the defaults.
Marketed drug	A drug trial moves onto the marketed-drug line, played on organ, on the date the FDA first approved its drug for any use. Approval dates come from Drugs@FDA (openFDA). CRISPR and gene therapies approved by FDA's biologics center are added by hand.
When it plays	How far the trial has travelled along its route. A trial that just started plays at the top of the bar. One near completion plays at the end.
Pitch	Latitude of the site the trial is passing. Sites further north play higher. Pitches snap to the current chord.
Left and right	Longitude of that site. The Americas sit left, Europe in the middle, Asia and Australia right.
Chord size	Number of countries in the trial. One country plays one note. Two to four countries play two. Five or more play three.
Loudness	People enrolled. Each note gets a marking from the people in its trials: pp under 30, p under 100, mp under 300, mf under 1,000, f under 3,000, ff above. The whole band also rides a marking, shown next to the year, from the people in all running trials compared with the busiest quarters for this condition (each trial counts for at most 5,000). A dot's size is its enrollment.
Phase	Shape, accent and length. Phase 1 is an open ring, played short and soft. Phase 2 is a dot at normal weight. Phase 3 is a dot with a halo, accented and held. Phase 4 is a square, softer and legato. Studies with no phase are diamonds.
Terminated	When a terminated trial reaches its stop date, its instrument plays a soft two-note step down and the dot leaves an X. The ticker shows the reason it stopped.
Phase 3 finished	A completed phase 3 trial plays a soft two-note step up on its own instrument, and a wide ring opens from its last site.
Open-label extension	Extension studies carry a dashed ring and echo their note twice, quieter each time.
Natural history	Observational natural history studies, registries and prospective cohorts are open grey rings. Together they hold a string chord under the band. More running cohorts add voices to the chord, and more people in them make it louder.
News	The crawl along the top shows milestones up to the playhead's date: approvals, failed trials, withdrawals and halts. Each links to its source. Ticks on the timeline mark when they happened.
Harmony	A four-bar loop in D Dorian: Dm9, G13, Fmaj9, Em7.
Bars view	Press Map / Bars (or the B key). Each line becomes one row, read left to right like a bar of music. A trial's place along its row is how far it has travelled along its route, which is when it plays. The playhead sweeps once per bar. Higher in the row means sites further north, which also means a higher note. Click a row name to mute it.
Listen from here	Click the map to place a listener. Trials near that point get louder.

Data

Lines come from intervention names first and the registry's intervention type second. Antibodies filed as "Drug" go on the antibody line. Imaging and blood draws filed as "Device" go on the diagnostics line. Classification is by rule, so some trials sit on the wrong line. Sites are grouped to about 10 km, and a route visits them nearest-first from the first listed site. Built on the idea of Train Jazz.