CTTI Shares Challenges and Solutions to Enrolling Participants in Pediatric Trials at AAP 2017

At the upcoming American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference, CTTI will offer insights into some of the biggest challenges currently affecting pediatric clinical trial enrollment and conduct. Through a podium presentation and poster sessions, CTTI will share survey-based findings that shed new light on obstacles affecting pediatric trials and discuss possible solutions that can help streamline these studies and reduce burdens on patients, families, and providers.

 

Although clinical trials are essential for ensuring access to safe and effective therapies for children, many studies struggle to enroll pediatric participants and families and providers often lack information to help them make the best possible treatment choices. This problem is especially acute for children and infants at risk of harm from bacterial infections, many of which are increasingly resistant to antibiotic treatment. For this reason, maintaining a strong pipeline of safe and effective therapies is an urgent priority.

 

CTTI’s Peds Trials project, part of the larger Antibacterial Drug Development Program, is actively addressing these gaps and has created evidence-based recommendations designed to improve and streamline pediatric trial development and conduct. We hope you will join us in Chicago this Sept. 16-19 as we share new insights into challenges affecting pediatric trial enrollment, including reasons that parents refuse trials and provider perceptions of obstacles.

 

Poster & Podium Presentation: Obstacles to Pediatric Clinical Trial Enrollment: Why Parents Refuse; Findings from the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative

Date & Time: Monday, Sept. 18, 12:35 p.m.–12:50 p.m. (oral presentation)

Monday, Sept. 18, 1:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m. (poster session)

Presenter: P. Brian Smith (Duke University)

 

Poster: Barriers to Pediatric Clinical Trial Enrollment: Findings and Recommendations from the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative

Date & Time: Monday, Sept. 18, 1:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m. (poster session)

Presenter: P. Brian Smith (Duke University)

CTTI Seeks to Speed Use of Mobile Technology in Clinical Trials through Novel Endpoint Recommendations

Novel Endpoints Recs Banner

New CTTI Recommendations and Tools Equip Stakeholders to Integrate Mobile Technology into Clinical Trials

Mobile technologies hold enormous promise for clinical research, but uncertainty about how to use the data captured by these devices has slowed progress. CTTI’s newly released recommendations and tools aim to change this by providing a pathway for using information gathered from mobile technologies to accelerate the development and evaluation of urgently needed therapies.

Mobile technologies such as remote sensors and wearables can be used to make trials faster, more efficient, and more inclusive. They can also spare patients from burdensome clinic visits while capturing new kinds of data that offer a better picture of how patients experience their disease or condition in their daily lives.

“Technology-derived endpoints offer the benefit of capturing information about patients’ experience in ‘real-world’ settings,” said Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “These tools have the potential to capture data that can be used to develop endpoints and evaluate therapies in the patient population.”

Responding to this potential, CTTI experts have crafted a set of recommendations and tools designed to help diverse stakeholders identify and develop novel endpoints based on data from mobile technologies for use in regulatory clinical trials.

“By engaging with experts who have been early champions of mobile technology in trials and combining that with patient insights, CTTI has created practical recommendations and action-oriented tools that have the potential to really accelerate the use of mobile technology in clinical trials,” noted Craig Lipset, Pfizer’s head of clinical innovation. “In particular, the use cases provide a realistic pathway for incorporating novel endpoints through technology into clinical development programs. CTTI’s recommendations show we may be closer than previously believed to realizing the benefits of these novel endpoints, creating a sense of urgency to act.”

In partnership with a group of investigators, regulators, patient representatives, technology developers, and research sponsors, four use cases were written to better guide the development and use of novel endpoints as part of clinical trials for Parkinson’s disease, heart failure, diabetes, and Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

“The Michael J. Fox Foundation was pleased to participate in CTTI’s efforts to develop novel mobile endpoints for use in clinical trials,” said Lauren Bataille, senior associate director of research partnerships at the Foundation. “We look forward to leveraging these assets to support Parkinson’s research collaborations and speed the developments of measures that matter to patients.”

CTTI’s Novel Endpoints recommendations are the first to be released as part of a larger body of work to address multiple challenges to using mobile technology in clinical trials. CTTI’s Mobile Clinical Trials Program includes additional projects on legal and regulatory considerations, stakeholder perceptions, and scientific and technical issues related to the use of mobile devices. Recommendations from these projects will follow over the next year.

Click here to view more information on CTTI’s Novel Endpoints Project.

To view a recording of the webinar that unveiled these recommendations, click here.

Webinar June 26: Launching New CTTI Recommendations to Accelerate the Appropriate Use of Mobile Technology in Clinical Trials

CTTI Webinar

Mobile technologies offer unique opportunities for making clinical trials faster, more efficient, and more representative of actual patient experiences. By addressing unmet needs for quality outcome measures, enabling more efficient alternatives to traditional clinical research models, and reducing dependence on data that represent only a tiny snapshot of patients’ experience of disease, mobile technologies allow us to capture new kinds of information while reducing the burdens of trial participation. However, realizing these benefits requires a clear understanding of how to successfully select, develop and incorporate technology-derived novel endpoints and incorporate them into clinical trials—a need that CTTI is addressing through its MCT Novel Endpoints Project.

Join us for a special webinar in which CTTI will present new recommendations and tools to support the selection, development, and inclusion of technology-derived novel endpoints in clinical trials.

ADD TO CALENDAR

Topic: Developing novel endpoints generated using mobile technology for use in clinical trials
Date: Monday, June 26, 2017 12:00 – 1:30 PM EDT (GMT-04:00)
Webinar Link: http://bit.ly/2rAJ9K7
Presenters:

  • Martin Landray (University of Oxford)
  • Marc Walton (Janssen)

Panel members sharing their perspectives on adoption of the recommendations:

  • Leonard Sacks (US Food and Drug Administration)
  • Lauren Bataille (Michael J. Fox Foundation)
  • Wendy Snyder (Amgen)
  • Rob Wilson (ActiGraph)

The webinar will include a first look at evidence-based approaches and tools that can be applied by research sponsors, investigators, technology developers, and patient groups to facilitate the use of novel endpoints derived from mobile technology in clinical trials. You will learn about a set of tools developed by CTTI’s expert stakeholders to guide the identification, development and inclusion of appropriate novel endpoints.

Our presenters and panel members will show how:

  • The clinical research enterprise can benefit from the appropriate inclusion of technology-derived novel endpoints in clinical trials
  • Sponsors and investigators can work effectively with regulators to develop high-quality novel endpoints to support regulatory submission and approval
  • Patient groups can both drive the identification of novel endpoints that measure symptoms that matter and participate in their development
  • Tech developers can better match product development to unmet needs and adapt solutions for the demands of clinical trials and the patient care environment
  • Stakeholders can collaborate to avoid common pitfalls in the development process

You will be introduced to four “real-world” use cases that shaped the development of these tools and recommendations, with key lessons to be carried forward to other therapeutic areas. You will also learn how these tools and recommendations can be applied in practice from our panel of early adopters.

This webinar is open to the public. Please feel free to share this invitation with your colleagues.

New CTTI Recommendations Provide Path for More Efficient Clinical Trials Using Clinical Registries

Registry Trials

CTTI’s newly released recommendations have the potential to streamline clinical trials by using registry information. Registries are data collection tools typically used to better understand long-term trends in a specific population, such as patients with a particular disease or patients exposed to a certain treatment.

“High-quality registries are an increasingly important source of evidence for regulatory decisions and surveillance, conveying important information, for example, regarding real-world medical product use and outcomes throughout the total product lifecycle,” said John Laschinger, MD, of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, who helped lead the CTTI work. “Use of high-quality registries as a vehicle for efficient conduct of randomized clinical trials is a proven concept that can be considered for future pre-market trials,” he added.

If registries are designed appropriately, the “real-world” data within them should often be able to meet the expectations of regulatory agencies, and support decisions about medical products. In this regard, CTTI addresses how to assess data quality, ensure patient protections, and link with other data sources. The recommendations apply to both existing and new registries. Following these best practices can assist in evaluating suitability of registry data for regulatory purposes.

“Conducting randomized clinical trials within registries can increase efficiencies in data collection and decrease site workload, potentially leading to significant cost savings,” said Sunil Rao, MD, principal investigator of the successful randomized registry-based clinical trial, SAFE-PCI for Women.

While the scope of this project was limited to registries, many of the principles and tools in these recommendations have the potential to be applied to using health care systems or other existing data sources, such as those available within claims databases, to facilitate more efficient clinical trials.

More information about these recommendations on conducting clinical trials using registries is available both on the Registry Trials Project page and in a webinar recording.

 

*To view the press release of this announcement, click here.

CTTI Leads Workshop and Shares Findings at International Meeting on Clinical Trials

LOOK FOR US AT SCT ICTMC 2017 IN LIVERPOOL FOR STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY AND EFFICIENCY OF CLINICAL TRIALS

You’re headed to Liverpool, take this printable one page schedule of CTTI’s presentations at the meeting. See you there!

CTTI will present its recommendations and latest findings in five sessions at the International Clinical Trials Methodology Conference (ICTMC) and Society for Clinical Trials (SCT) Annual Meeting, May 7-10, 2017. We will lead a hands-on workshop on best practices for Data Monitoring Committees, and share our evidence and strategies on embedding randomized clinical trials within registries, developing novel endpoints generated by mobile technology, and more.


Session Title: Formative Research Findings on the Design of an Early Enrollment Clinical Trial on Hospital Acquired Bacterial Pneumonia (HABP) and Ventilator Associated Bacterial Pneumonia (VABP) (Parallel Session 1.5 – Qualitative Research)
Date & Time: Monday May 8 from 1:30–2:30 p.m.
Speaker: Amy Corneli, Duke University
Related CTTI Project: HABP/VABP Studies


Post/our-work/novel-clinical-trial-designs/antibiotic-drug-development/abdd-habp-vabp-studies/er Abstract: Embedding Randomized Clinical Trials within Registries: How Feasible? (Poster Board #152)
Date & Time: Monday, May 8 from 3:40–4:25 p.m.
Speaker: Ted Lystig, Medtronic
Related CTTI Project: Registry Trials


Poster Abstract: Developing Novel Endpoints Generated by Mobile Technology for Use in Clinical Trials: A Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative (CTTI) Project (Poster Board #153)
Date & Time: Monday, May 8 from 3:40–4:25 p.m.
Speaker: Martin Landray, University of Oxford
Related CTTI Project: MCT Novel Endpoints


Workshop Title: Data Monitoring Committees: Multi-stakeholder Recommendations and Hands-on Experience from CTTI and the MRCT Center (Workshop 3)
Date & Time: Tuesday, May 9 from 8:30–10:00 a.m.
Speaker: Annemarie Forrest, CTTI
Related CTTI Project: DMCs


Panel: Clinical / Outcomes Registry-Based Randomised Controlled Trials – The Future for Clinical Trials? (Invited Session 3.5)
Date & Time: Tuesday, May 9 from 8:30–10:00 a.m.
Speaker: Ted Lystig, Medtronic
Related CTTI Project: Registry Trials

Public and Stakeholders Encouraged to Comment on Protocol for Innovative Clinical Trial

SENTINEL IMPACT-AFIB DRAFT PROTOCOL POSTED

The draft protocol for an innovative pragmatic clinical trial examining educational methods for improving medication utilization in patients with atrial fibrillation (AFib) has been posted on Sentinel Initiative website. This draft protocol is now available for public comment and feedback as part of process that seeks to engage all potential stakeholders in study development and implementation.

The Sentinel IMPACT-AFib study grew out of findings from a pilot program in which CTTI, through its Electronic Healthcare Data project, evaluated the feasibility of using data from FDA’s Sentinel System to conduct clinical trials. IMPACT-AFib marks the first time the Sentinel System has been used to support a randomized pragmatic clinical trial—not only by serving as a primary source for study data, but also by helping study organizers to identify potential participants.

Atrial fibrillation affects more than 5 million people in the United States. It is a serious condition in which the upper chambers of the heart beat with an irregular rhythm. More common among persons aged 65 years or older, AFib increases a person’s risk of stroke by up to five times and contributes to an estimated 130,000 deaths annually in the United States alone. Although AFib can be treated effectively with a number of different oral anticoagulant (OAC) medications, many of the people who stand to benefit from these therapies do not receive them.

Find out more about AFib and the background of the Sentinel IMPACT AFib trial by clicking here to access a CTTI webinar and slides.