FDA started the Breakthrough Therapy Designation program in 2012. Since then, Genentech has garnered 15 designations, more than any other company. Jeffrey Siegel has been an instrumental component of that success. Siegel is Genentech’s senior group medical director and spent 14 years with FDA prior to joining the company. He has spent most of his career in pharma developing products to address the unmet medical needs of patients.
The National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) is a not-for-profit organization that has been around for over 100 years. Its primary mission is assessing the qualifications of healthcare professionals. More recently, the group has been looking into developing an assessment that would be helpful to clinical researchers.
TransCelerate Biopharma is all about collaboration. The group’s goal is to identify, prioritize, design, and facilitate the implementation of solutions to help sponsors efficiently and effectively produce needed medicines for patients. In this interview Deb Driscoll, VP of quality assurance at Merck and lead of the TransCelerate QMS (quality management system), discusses how the initiative hopes to improve quality in clinical trials.
Fitness trackers were popular holiday gifts this year and sales are on the rise. While counting steps and getting fit may be the primary reason consumers are purchasing Fitbits and other wearables, other sensors these devices include, such as heart rate and sleep monitors, could actually help big pharma collect a wealth of valuable data to revolutionize personalized medicine.
In an era where data acquisition (eg. ePRO), capture (EDC) and storage (eTMF) are done electronically, it is the logical consequence to do the same for the informed consent process as all the advantages of the electronic modality equally apply to this process.
The introduction of electronic data capture (EDC) systems in clinical trial data management and analysis triggered the promise of better-managed clinical trials – with greater efficiency, faster access to higher-quality clinical data and better mapping of data flows to business processes.
