-
The Health Research Authority (HRA) announced that England and Wales have begun implementing changes to their clinical trial regulations on June 1st, 2024. These changes include the removal of the requirement for trials to submit annual progress report to their Research Ethics Committee (REC) and the process of submitting safety reports. Scotland and Northern Ireland, following review, also implemented these changes to their regulations making the updates now applicable in all four of the UK nations as of August 1st, 2024.
-
On November 6th, 2024, the International Council of Harmonization (ICH) published the draft version of ICH E6(R3) Annex 2, a long awaited update to the good clinical practice (GCP) section of the ICH Harmonized Guidelines.
-
In October 2024, The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a final guidance: “Electronic Systems, Electronic Records, and Electronic Signatures in Clinical Investigations: Questions and Answers”. It is intended for sponsors, principal investigators, institutional review boards (IRB), contracted research organizations (CRO) (all of which are considered regulated entities) and other interested clinical trial stakeholders that use electronic records and systems.
-
In September 2024, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released another draft guidance titled “Considerations for Generating Clinical Evidence from Oncology Multiregional Clinical Development Programs” for sponsors intending to conduct global clinical development programs (CDP) for new cancer treatments. The guidance provides advice on using evidence obtained from multi-regional clinical trials (MRCT) to support marketing applications.
-
In September 2024, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published a draft guidance for industry titled: Integrating Randomized Controlled Trials for Drug and Biological Products Into Routine Clinical Practice in association with the FDA’s Real-World Evidence program. This guidance was released the day before their final guidance on Conducting Clinical Trials With Decentralized Elements, both guidance discuss the FDA’s current position on collecting health information from sources outside of the clinical research site in order to improve enrollment and protocol adherence to scheduled visits
-
A recent US Food And Drug Administration (FDA) investigator warning letter focused on record retention. According to FDA regulations, site records must be retained for at least two years after a marketing application is approved or two years after the study is closed (21 CFR 312.62(c)).
-
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a draft guidance “Digital Health Technologies for Remote Data Acquisition in Clinical Investigations” for public comment in December 2021. The draft guidance provides best practices for how digital health technologies (DHT) can be used to collect and support endpoint data and what information is needed in an investigational new drug application (IND) or an investigational device exemption (IDE) application that uses DHT. DHT is a “system that uses computing platforms, connectivity, software, and/or sensors, for healthcare and related uses.”
-
The European Medicines Agency (EMA), European Commission (EC), and the Heads of Medicines Agencies (HMA) published “Accelerating Clinical Trials in the EU” (ACT EU) in January 2022, a strategy paper outlining their collaborative initiative to transform clinical trials in the European Union (EU). The purpose of the initiative is to work together with the EU Clinical Trials Regulation (Regulation (EU) No 536/2014) (CTR) to support strengthening how European clinical trials are designed, initiated, and conducted, while maintaining participant safety, robust and quality data, and transparency.
-
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a draft guidance, “Assessing the Credibility of Computational Modeling and Simulation in Medical Device Submissions” late December 2021. The draft guidance provides a framework for assessing if software modeling used to support medical device premarket submissions are credible. Regulatory submissions often lack adequate explanation of the rationale for the models’ credibility for the context of use (COU). The COU is the specific role and scope of the model used to address the “question of interest.”
-
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a draft guidance “Content of Premarket Submissions for Device Software Functions.” The draft guidance clarifies documentation that is needed for a premarket submission for device software functions. The 21st Century Cures Act excluded certain software functions from the definition of device (see the guidance, “Changes to Existing Medical Software Policies Resulting from Section 3060 of the 21st Century Cures Act”). The draft guidance addresses these changes as well as the evolution of digital health and the recent FDA recognized consensus standards for software, which are standards that the FDA determines can support clearance or approval of a device.
