When the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) identifies significant findings with the conduct of a clinical trial during an inspection, what happens to those findings? According to a recent article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine, those findings remain hidden in plain sight.

As monitors, we spend a decent amount of time preparing for the visit – before we even head out the door. On the road, we’ve noticed that the most effective coordinators tend to be those who also prepare for the visit. Spending an extra hour or two before the visit can decrease the amount of queries, follow-up items and even the length of the visit itself. Before your next monitoring visit, consider asking yourself these five questions:

There has been a recent trend in clinical research toward the use of central Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) or Ethics Committees (ECs) for multi-center trials. 21 CFR Part 56.114 outlines the following on cooperative research:

Since the suicide death of Dan Markingson in May of 2004, there has been a lot of debate as to whether or not the 26 year old psychiatric patient should have been approached to consent to participate in a clinical research trial for the comparison of three atypical antipsychotic drugs. Recently, there has been an article published in the Minnesota Daily about a petition signed by over 3,000 ethicists, researchers and scholars asking the University of Minnesota’s President to review the case to prevent future tragedies at the institution. Such a petition was created due to several errors in processes related to human subject protection.

The FDA’s device center (CDRH) has established time based performance standards to help ensure draft guidance documents do not remain in an unresolved state for too long.  The following draft performance goals have been outlined:

On Friday, May 23, 2014 the Federal Register announced a notice that in an effort to increase the quality and efficiency of clinical trials, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was planning to grant a one-year, $7,500,000 grant to Duke University’s Translational Medicine Institute (DTMI) (renewable up to a total of five years, $37,500,000). This grant would primarily go to fund the public-private partnership Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative (CTTI).  CTTI  was originally created as a partnership between the FDA and Duke University in 2008, but now includes more than 60 organizations with representatives from government agencies, industry, patient advocacy groups, professional societies, investigator groups, academic institutions, and other interested parties.

What is a guidance document and how should they be used? A guidance document represents the FDA’s current thinking on a topic. Per FDA’s website, guidance documents “do not create or confer any rights for or on any person and do not operate to bind FDA or the public. You can use an alternate approach if the approach satisfies the requirements of the applicable statues and regulations.” Guidance documents usually discuss FDA’s interpretation of their policy on a regulatory issue.

You may be familiar with IMARC Research’s History of Clinical Research (HCR). We recently released an eBook about it that briefly describes all of the images that currently make up the timeline. If you have visited our office, you may have also been given a guided tour of one of our most renowned resources. Due to the overwhelmingly positive feedback we have received, we will be highlighting each time point with a series of blogs that we plan to release over the course of the 2014-2015 calendar year.

Merriam Webster defines a case study as a published report about a person, group, or situation that has been studied over time; also : a situation in real life that can be looked at or studied to learn about something.  Case studies can be useful to help highlight how to handle a particular situation, including the eventual outcome.

Do you know why rules, regulations and standards exist? What exactly is Good Clinical Practice and how does this help protect patients and data integrity?