Pitt research registry reaches 250,000 participants

Pitt+Me, the program that links people of all ages to hundreds of research studies at the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC, has reached a milestone — 250,000 enrolled participants, including more than 12,000 from the Pitt community.

The program started in 2008 as the CTSI Participant Registry. That year it enrolled 4,200 participants for 75 studies. As of April of this year, there were 400 active studies using people registered through Pitt+Me. Since 2016, the program has recruited participants for more than 1,387 studies. It is one of the largest registries in the U.S.

Those signed up include more than 179,900 adults and 69,400 children. Of those, approximately 150,200 were female and 98,400 male.

During the pandemic, Pitt+Me has recruited for 19 COVID-19 studies, including vaccine trials.

Once people enroll in Pitt+Me, they can search online and over the phone for studies they qualify for and are interested in. Personalized recommendations also are delivered by email. Find a full list of active studies on the Pitt+Me website.  Many of the studies provide some compensation and can be done completely online or over the phone.

The studies can be open to all adults, such as the vaccine research, or can focus on people with specific diseases or professions.

Some even are specifically recruiting Pitt community members, such as the Black Women in Academia: Supporting, Healing, and Empowering study, which is looking for faculty or staff members who provide services to students who have experienced sexual misconduct, and separately is recruiting undergraduate students. The study is looking at Black undergraduate college women's experiences with sexual misconduct: knowledge of resources, barriers to access, and strategies to improve engagement and outcomes.