Rede Nacional de Ensaios Pediátricos - STAND4Kids (AIDFM)

The STAND4Kids is the Portuguese national network of pediatric clinical trials that facilitates the execution of high-quality, child/family-centered, and clinically relevant pediatric clinical trials with operational efficiency, promoted by the industry and academia in Portugal.

Our single point of contact and portfolio management team work closely with 10 research centers, supporting them through standardized procedures to assist industry sponsors, academics, and CROs throughout the entire lifecycle of pediatric studies involving drugs, devices, or other interventions, both in common and rare diseases, optimizing their planning and execution from feasibility assessment to recruitment.

The STAND4Kids also ensures a set of support activities, maintaining regular engagement with its network centers, providing training opportunities and content for professionals and the public, engaging with stakeholders such as scientific societies within the pediatric community, other networks and infrastructures, competent authorities, research agencies, and funders, promoting the involvement of children, youth, and patient organizations, and contributing, in coordination with academia, to a better understanding of the environment and the national pediatric research landscape.

We collaborate with a wide range of organizations and research initiatives within the pediatric research ecosystem, particularly with conect4children-Stichting, a pan-European pediatric clinical trial network.

Our main services and activities include:
• operating a national single point of contact for pediatric trials and studies;
• providing national-level contributions for study preparation (e.g., standards of care, patient pathways, referral routes);
• supporting and carrying out site identification and feasibility assessment requests, at both national and site levels;
• facilitating site preparation/start-up and supporting patient recruitment and study execution, at both national and site levels;
• supporting the implementation of national and local standards, as well as training activities for the qualification and capacity building of national sites;
• engaging children and youth and integrating their inputs into study design and implementation through the YPAG Lisboa, a Young Persons Advisory Group.