Compliance In Focus

Clinical project management is a logical and often desirable1 career progression for those in CRA roles. While the exact path from CRA to project manager (PM) varies from company to company and person to person, the first step for the budding PM usually involves education. For most, this training comes in the form of a project management course or seminar.

IMARC Research has created a new whitepaper that highlights the Guidance for Ensuring your Clinical Study is Being Designed, Executed, and Monitored in Accordance with the ISO 14155.2011 International Device Standards. The goal of this paper is to introduce some suggestions on how to set up a study for successful compliance with both the FDA regulations and ISO 14155, giving some practical advice on how these additional ISO requirements can be added.

While inspections of studies with pending marketing applications are considered routine, FDA has recently shifted its focus toward an early intervention paradigm. Under this design, BIMO Inspections can occur prior to trial completion. This approach allows FDA the opportunity to affect proactive change and continuously improve clinical investigator compliance. Early intervention inspections can be challenging to predict as the audits are not necessarily triggered by a sponsor regulatory submission.

The extreme workload of research coordinators is well documented in the clinical research industry. Clinical Research Coordinators (CRCs) are often tasked with clinical care and administrative duties – like budget negotiation and data entry into electronic databases.   This intense workload frequently impacts the timeliness of data entry and safety reporting.

There continues to be much discussion over the FDA’s 510(k) program, which has led to controversy and confusion over the direction of the program. In fact, we have posted many blogs devoted to this topic, so we thought it was time to create a whitepaper focusing on the topic.

As the regulators continue to raise the bar for quality clinical research investigations, IMARC has released a whitepaper that discusses the principles of risk management and their application to clinical research.

The guidance documents for good clinical practice (GCP), ICH E6 and ISO14155, state the sponsor is responsible for quality assurance and quality control within a clinical trial. To achieve this, the sponsor must invest resources into these different aspects of a clinical trial. One specific aspect of integrating quality involves how risks are approached and managed throughout the course of a study. Both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) released documents in 2013 focused on the integration of traditionally development and manufacturing quality principles, including risk-based approaches into the clinical research industry. FDA’s “Guidance for Industry: Oversight of Clinical Investigations—A Risk-Based Approach to Monitoring” and EMA’s “Reflection paper on risk based quality management in clinical trials” both describe how regulators now expect a quality, risk-based approach when conducting clinical research. These documents are examples of the shift toward quality techniques underway within industry when developing, initiating, and executing studies.