Clinical Trials Monitor

This is a personal project to receive alerts when clinical trials are updated on clinicaltrials.gov.

Keeping track of multiple trials, and determining what exactly has changed is a time consuming process. Luckily, ClinicalTrials.gov provides an API, so I've built a "clinicaltrials monitor" to receive automatic updates of the trials that I'm interested in.

The service uses the following technology:

• Serverless Framework, with:
  • AWS CloudFormation
  • serverless-offline
  • serverless-step-functions
  • serverless-step-functions-offline
• AWS Step Functions, with:
  • AWS Lambda (Node.js)
• MongoDB Atlas
  • Mongo Seeding
• AWS Simple Email Service
• clinicaltrials.gov API

The Step Functions workflow is executed several times per day, see how it works below:

Step Functions workflow

• A MongoDB collection holds a list of clinical trials to monitor
• A Step Functions workflow is periodically executed to check for updated trials
• For each updated trial, a Lambda function is triggered, to:
  • Fetch the full trial record and update it in MongoDB
  • Determine the diff between the previous and latest version of the trial
• Once all trial records have been updated, another Lambda function is triggered, to:
  • Format a summary of all detected changes
  • Send the summary as an email