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Showing posts with label regulation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label regulation. Show all posts

Tuesday, 12 December 2017

Developing a Common Health Data Model for Europe

The European Medicines Agency has been holding a 2 day international workshop in London [11th -12th December 2017] to define  opportunities and challenges for a common health data model in Europe. The expected outcome of the workshop was agreeing guiding principles for the development of such a Common Data Model (CDM) in Europe, including key criteria for validation in the context of regulatory decision-making.

See more about the workshop

 
A common data model could help harmonise healthcare data across multiple data sets and provide a mechanism to conduct pan-European studies in a timely manner to address regulatory questions. At the same time, applying a common model to European data has multiple challenges. The meeting brought together regulators with academia, data holders and the pharmaceutical industry.

Sessions included talks from experts from North America and the European region discussing lessons learned and current challenges in very large current clinical data resources, regulatory verification and related issues. Common data model case studies  included Sentinel – the Harvard-based FDA system for accessing patient data from health data partners across the USA and CNODES (the Canadian Network for Operational Drug Effect Studies) which can access data on 100 million patients – a similar scale to Sentinel.


The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Sentinel Initiative uses a common health data model to improve the FDA’s ability to identify safety issues for medical products. Sentinel actively surveys pre-existing electronic healthcare data from multiple sources.

Themes at the workshop included ensuring the relevance of CDMs to health policy, keeping timelines short, inter-operability, consent and related ethical issues, and careful internal and external validation of clinical definitions, data, software and analytical models.

From the perspective of health professionals, policy makers, regulators and the public, key future questions include whether clinical outcomes from common data models will be generalisable or only relevant to specific sub-populations based on geography, genetics, demographics and/or complex co-morbidity.  In the era of precision medicine there is the clear need is to avoid “right” answers from the wrong clinical populations and “wrong” answers from the right populations.
Further key points to consider include the cost of CDMs and who should pay; and whether updating existing databases will be sufficient or will new, more robust databases be needed.

 Future EACPT Congresses will be held in:
- 2019 Stockholm
- 2021 Athens
- 2023 Rotterdam

The EACPT was founded in 1993 - 24 years ago - and now includes as members all major national organisations for clinical pharmacology in Europe, as well as organisations from further afield internationally. The EACPT aims to provide educational and scientific support for the more than 4000 individual professionals interested in clinical pharmacology and therapeutics throughout the European region, with its congresses attended by a global audience. The EACPT also advises policy makers on how the specialty can contribute to human health and wealth.

Clinical Therapeutics, the Official Journal of EACPT


Tuesday, 17 January 2017

ADAPTSMART: Accelerated Development of Appropriate Patient Therapies -

London, EMA, 17th January 2017: ADAPT SMART is a  platform funded by the European Union's IMI (Innovative Medicines Initiative) for the coordination of Medicines Adaptive Pathways to Patients (MAPPs) activities, involving multi-stakeholder approaches from research through to treatment outcomes.

MAPPs seek to foster access to beneficial treatments for the right patient groups at the earliest appropriate time in the product life-span in a sustainable fashion.

The European Medicines Agency is today hosting at Canary Wharf in London an expert workshop on ADAPTSMART, with delegates from throughout the European Region, from the Japanese medicines agency and elsewhere.

Topics include:

- appropriate use of medicines

- timely access to innovative medicines and other interventions

- early access medicine schemes

- protected therapeutic schemes e.g. cancer access funds

 - compassionate use

- expanded access pathways

- shortened timelines for approvals

- international comparisons for consequences of inappropriate prescribing - non-compliance with treatment guidelines. Differences will be considered where reimbursement is linked to compliance with prescribing guidelines.

See more on the ADAPTSMART website about key work packages and other aspects.

Tuesday, 15 November 2016

Opportunities from Big Data for safer medicines

14-15 November, 2016: The European Medicines Agency is hosting a web-casted workshop in London on identifying opportunities from "Big Data" in development and regulation of medicines. There has been such strong interest that a much larger venue is being used than available at its usual Canary Wharf centre, with perspectives from EU and USA policy makers, regulators, academia, health professionals and industry.

The EMA note: "Rapid developments in technology have led to the generation of vast volumes of data, which have the capability to transform the way the benefit-risk of medicinal products is assessed over their entire life cycle. However, it is recognised there are multiple challenges in the exploitation of these data. These range from the fundamental need to establish methods to enable the access to, integration and analysis of heterogeneous datasets to understanding the limitations in its use. Importantly, robust and transparent mechanisms to protect patient confidentiality are key to secure patient trust. It is important for the European Medicines Agency and the European Union medicines regulatory network to gather information on the latest developments in big data from the perspective of all stakeholders in order to identity how and when the multitude of data sources may contribute to medicinal product development, authorisation and post-marketing surveillance."

Some key threads and discussion points:
- the importance of the FAIR principles (data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and
- Reusable)
- access for health professionals and researchers to the European Open Science Cloud
- a major EU initiative to promote data curation
- the power of the Cloud for cross-platform data sharing
- Big Data applied to precision medicine and pharmacogenomics
- bias in datasets
- Big Data and new EU General Data Protection Regulations - from May 2018, replacing Directive 95/46
- machine-learning for chemogenomics
- challenges to implementing applications to precision medicines in 'time poor' clinical practice
- OHDSI comumity - access to international health record data sources
- twitter not designed as a health app but may provide complementary insight into unexpected adverse effects of medicines to that obtained through traditional pharmacovigilance routes
- transferable learning - e.g. from use of Big Data in transport networks
- case studies in the EU and USA
- trade-offs: methods might be rapid, unbiased and accessible/usable by the inexperienced: but not all three
- challenges in the European Region to maximise learning from Big Health Data when there are 28 independent national health care systems with barriers and challenges to data-sharing

All talks are due to be made available on the EMA website for public access.

Thursday, 21 February 2013

Update on 28-31 August 2013 EACPT Congress in Geneva

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The abstract deadline for the next biennial EACPT Congress is only 6 weeks away: 8th April 2013.
See the EACPT Congress blog for summaries on many of the symposia to be held during the Congress: from new therapeutic biomarkers, to new biomarker and treatment targets (cancer, eye disease, predictive pharmacogenetics, inborn errors of metabolism, therapeutic drug monitoring ...), and how to improve safety in prescribing ...

The Congress will be held at the International Congress Centre of Geneva from 28 to 31 August 2013. 

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Over 900 participants are expected to attend including health professionals, scientists, policy makers, biotechnology and pharmaceutical professionals and others with an interest in basic and clinical pharmacology, pharmacotherapy, drug discovery and development, regulatory affairs and related areas.

Abstract submission

Registration

2013 EACPT Geneva Congress website.

Friday, 31 August 2012

More on the 2013 EACPT Geneva Congress


The European Association for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics 11th biennial Congress will be held at the International Congress Centre of Geneva (CICG) from 28 to 31 August 2013.

Cathedral and Lake Geneva fountain
Registration will open 10th October 2012. Abstract submissions will also open 10thOctober 2012 and will close 8th February 2013. To receive updates on the congress before registering, you can submit your email address to the congress organisers.

Over 900 participants are expected to attend including health professionals, scientists, policy makers, biotechnology and pharmaceutical professionals and others with an interest in basic and clinical pharmacology, pharmacotherapy, drug discovery and development, regulatory affairs and related areas.

More information on the aims and key themes, and to contact the organisers, see:

Congress Website: http://www.eacpt2013.org
Secretariat email: eacptreg@mci-group.com




Saturday, 14 April 2012

Update from Geneva

The latest meeting of the EACPT Executive has just finished in Geneva in advance of the next major EACPT biennial congress, which is to be held in this lakeside Swiss city in the summer of 2013.

Here are three important updates about the EACPT's scientific and educational programmes:

The next EACPT summer school will be held on 23rd to 25th August 2012 in Amsterdam, with an excellent range of topics for delegates interested in education in key principles relevant to clinical pharmacology. See the website for further information.

At the next European Pharmacology Congress in Granada  July 17th - 20th, 2012,  EACPT Vice-President Professor Tabassome Simon from Paris will give the keynote EACPT lecture on the application of pharmacogenetic testing to cardiovascular therapeutics.

Cathedral and Lake Geneva fountain (jet d'eau)
The EACPT is developing the programme for its next biennial congress, to be held in beautiful Geneva, 28th - 31st August in 2013. Key themes at the congress will range from bedside pharmacology for special patient groups to pharmacology & toxicology, and pharmacology and society. Specific topics will include advances in personalised diagnostics to improve the safety and effectiveness of medicines, updates on new biological approaches to ocular disease, therapeutics of cardiovascular, cancer and inflammatory disease, clinical trial design and regulation, and drug safety and toxicology.