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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.
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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.
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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.
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In September 2024, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released another draft guidance titled “Considerations for Generating Clinical Evidence from Oncology Multiregional Clinical Development Programs” for sponsors intending to conduct global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.
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In September 2024, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published a draft guidance for industry titled: Integrating Randomized Controlled Trials for Drug and Biological Products Into Routine Clinical Practice in association with the FDA’s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
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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is requesting input from stakeholders and patients on patient safety for medical software functions that are not defined as medical devices by the 21st Century Cures Act (“Cures Act”) of 2016. Some examples of these are healthy lifestyle apps, electronic medical records, and systems that display lab results.
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The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) announced its plans to strengthen regulations for medical devices within the United Kingdom (UK).
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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a draft guidance “Evaluation of Therapeutic Equivalence” July 2022 on how it evaluates therapeutic equivalence (TE) and assigns therapeutic equivalence codes. Therapeutic equivalence means that drugs are 1) pharmaceutically equivalent, 2) bioequivalent, and 3) have the same clinical effect and safety profile.
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Our article “CRO Oversight Essentials” was recently published in Clinical Leader. Following are some key points.
Oversight does not mean micromanagement. A CRO is contracted for its specific capabilities. It is important to allow the CRO to do whatever it does best and not to overcontrol how they implement.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a draft guidance “Patient-Focused Drug Development: Selecting, Developing, or Modifying Fit-for-Purpose Clinical Outcome Assessments” June 2022. The focus of the draft guidance is on selecting, modifying, developing, and validating clinical outcome assessments (COA), such as patient reported outcome (PRO), that are meaningful to patients, with an emphasis on methods to ensure high quality measures are utilized.
