Drugmakers and clinician organizations praised the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) recent draft guidance containing recommendations on developing a Race and Ethnicity Diversity Plan to improve enrollment of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups in clinical trials. But in public comments, they also called for greater details on the types of data that should be used to assess adequate enrollment of these populations, how these diversity plans should be applied to...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) needs to take a more proactive approach in combatting misinformation and communicating decisions to the public when approving drugs, especially when the decision goes against the recommendations of its advisory committees. Not doing so will continue to undermine the public’s trust in the agency, said a panel of former FDA commissioners and others at the Food and Drug Law Institute (FDLI) annual conference on Tuesday.   Califf ad...

The US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) top drug official said the pandemic has prompted the agency to consider new ways of working going forward and has renewed calls for industry to embrace digital technologies and decentralized models for conducting clinical trials. The pandemic has also prompted the agency to re-evaluate its hiring practices, and to adopt the use of alternative tools in lieu of onsite inspections, which have become a permanent fixture in the agency...

A study conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA) found that the agencies are identifying the same types of deficiencies in joint good clinical practice (GCP) inspections with respect to protocol compliance, documentation deviations, and human subject protections.   The paper follows a mutual transatlantic cooperation on GCPs between the regulators that went into effect on 1 September 2009. Under the program, regulators ...

Feature articles during April examined the roles of the regulatory specialist and generalist and the application of regulatory intelligence (RI) in managing the new EU In Vitro Diagnostic Medical Devices Regulation (IVDR), developing an in-house regulatory database in the oncology setting, and strategic planning. Also included are articles on expedited regulatory pathway options, selecting control groups in pediatric clinical trials, and the role of artificial intelligence...

The International Council for Harmonization (ICH) on Tuesday released a draft ICH E11A guideline that establishes a framework for extrapolating drug development data from adult trials to the pediatric population.   “This new ICH guideline aims to promote international harmonization of methodologies and strategies to incorporate paediatric extrapolation into overall drug development plans and to improve the speed of access to new drugs for paediatric patients, while l...

While a lot of researchers claim they are capturing digital biomarker data, they may in fact be collecting clinical outcomes assessment (COA) data according to some US regulators. To clarify the differences, top US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials have defined digital biomarkers versus other kinds of data in a new article.   According to FDA officials in an article published on 25 March in npj Digital Medicine , a digital biomarker is “a characteristic o...

ICH E10 provides specific guidance on the choice of control groups for clinical trials, but there are additional considerations for choosing a control group for a pediatric trial. In this article, the author looks at different types of control groups and the specific challenges that present when considering the design for a pediatric trial, such as the medical condition being treated, the potential patient population, suitability of comparators, and availability of real-wo...

A number of stakeholders have written to the US Food and Drug Administration about the agency’s recent draft guidance on how digital health technologies (DHT) could be used to conduct clinical trials remotely. Some have concerns about the agency too narrowly defining what products can be used for remote monitoring, while others argue it’s not broad enough. Some are also asking the agency to include smart packaging in the guidance.   In December, the agency published i...

The delayed Clinical Trials Regulation (CTR) is set to take effect on Monday, 31 January, marking a milestone in the European Union’s attempt to improve transparency and boost the amount of human research that takes place in the region.   Currently, sponsors must file clinical trial applications to national regulators and ethics committees in each country that they want to include in their studies, then cope with multiple processes for registering their studies and pos...

Regulatory and industry experts agree that completing confirmatory studies quickly is essential to the success of the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) accelerated approval program, with some suggesting that new legislation might be necessary to reliably get results from these trials in a timelier manner.   Robert Califf, head of clinical policy and strategy for Verily and Google Health and the Biden Administration’s nominee to be FDA commissioner, said a legisla...

Industry, medical societies and other stakeholders have weighed in on draft guidance from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) detailing how sponsors that want to study multiple versions of cell and gene therapies could combine them in a single “umbrella” trial.   The draft guidance, released in September 2021, outlined FDA’s proposed thinking for how this process would work. For cell and gene therapies intended to treat a single disease, sponsors would typically ...