ABSTRACT
With the adoption of the Clinical Trials Directive it was Europe's intention to make the performance of multi-national clinical trials in Europe easier through the harmonization of the regulatory procedures. As the Directive was mainly conceived to facilitate the performance of multi-national clinical trials to develop new drugs, it is to be determined to what extent academic clinical trials will be concerned by the Directive and more importantly what will be its impact on daily academic clinical research. Contrary to several national regulations the scope of the Directive is very large only excluding non-interventional trials. This implies that most of the academic clinical trials will be concerned by the Directive. Besides the handling of the regulatory procedures in the different countries, issues related to insurance, labeling requirements and provision of the investigational medical products will expose the academic sponsor to additional administrative and financial challenges that will have to be handled appropriately, as the academic sponsors will be controlled by Inspectors regarding their compliance with the new regulations to come.
Subject(s)
Biomedical Research/legislation & jurisprudence , Biomedical Research/standards , Clinical Trials as Topic/legislation & jurisprudence , Clinical Trials as Topic/standards , Academic Medical Centers , Biomedical Research/ethics , Clinical Trials as Topic/ethics , Drug Labeling/legislation & jurisprudence , Drugs, Investigational/economics , Ethics Committees, Clinical , Europe , Helsinki Declaration , Human Experimentation/ethics , Human Experimentation/legislation & jurisprudence , Human Experimentation/standards , HumansABSTRACT
Since the Declaration of Helsinki, the performance of clinical trials is subject to ethical and gradually also legal requirements. As the EORTC is performing clinical trials in more then 30 countries, it gained expertise in the field of Regulatory Affairs of all those countries. This paper intends to address the general approach with regard to European Regulatory Affairs. Furthermore, it is focusing on the role of the EORTC at the level of the competent regulatory authorities. As recently things are moving and changing on a European level, it describes the perception of the current and future European regulatory framework, and last, but not least, it is explained in what respect the achievements of the EORTC could be of benefit to society when defining their cancer treatment policies.
