Efficacy and safety of medicines can vary depending on a number of intrinsic and extrinsic factors, such as an individual’s genetic background, ethnicity, lifestyle, and age. In appreciation of these differences and in the interest of generating generalizable knowledge—the participant population enrolled in a clinical trial ought to be representative of the general population. Despite this normative ideal, underrepresentation of gender, sex, ethnic, and racial minorities in clinical trials persists.
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Presently, there is no operational framework to guides investigators in designing, and IRBs in evaluating, recruitment methodologies and payment proposals to international research participants. This lack of guidance has been a cause for concern amongst regulators, trialists, advocacy groups, and research participants –especially when conducting clinical trials in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs).
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This meeting of the MRCT Center Bioethics Collaborative will explore the ethical considerations underscoring the challenge of informed selection of clinical trials. We will examine the responsibilities of various stakeholders within the clinical trial ecosystem, and we will discuss potential solutions.
The current landscape of clinical trial identification, referral, selection, and enrollment depends largely upon access to clinical trial information by a multiplicity of stakeholders. Unfortunately, access to this information is fragmented. Treating physicians do not routinely discuss clinical trials with their patients; investigators recommend enrollment in the clinical trials in which they or their institution are involved, but often not others; institutional IRBs evaluate the potential benefit/risk calculus for a given trial without consideration of the entire landscape of competitive trials; institutions do not consistently provide patients with instructions or guidance on navigating patient advocacy and trial registry websites, nor do they refer patients to external resources (e.g., patient advocacy groups and disease advocacy organizations) to help navigate the choice among alternative trials; existing clinical trial databases are often incomplete and complex, and they do not convey information in ways that help patients and providers choose among available trials. As a result, patients’ knowledge of their clinical trial options is often incomplete, and enrollment decisions are based on limited information.
Patients can, and often want to, be empowered with clinical trial information that is understandable and accessible. But institutional walls appear to have created artificial boundaries around the choice of clinical trials. We have not equipped patients to compare the suitability of the clinical trial(s) offered by their physicians with those offered down the block or across the river, concordant with their own preferences. As availability of electronic information increases (and with the appreciation that more information is not necessarily better information), our current systems may be improved to better uphold the foundational ethical principles of clinical research. These principles—respect for persons, beneficence, and justice—and their application to how we offer, and how patients select, clinical trials deserve review.
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The MRCT Center Return of Individual Results Work Group has formulated key principles and recommendations on the return of individual results to research participants from clinical trials in which the participants were enrolled (see above). A number of unanswered questions, however, related to return of individual results to research participants persist. For example, who should communicate urgent results and urgent incidental findings to individual research participants? The lead or site investigators? The referring health care provider? The study sponsors? This meeting explored the pragmatic considerations underlying the return of individual results to research participants and axes of communication.
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The use of social media in clinical research carries many potential benefits—for example, it enables the creation of valuable support and communication networks for research participants. However, it also carries potential risks, including the possibility that participants may share information online in ways that permit themselves, other participants, and/or the research team to be unblinded to key aspects of the research data. These potential risks, as well as the practical approaches by which they may be mitigated, were the topic of the January 22nd meeting of the Bioethics Collaborative.
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The widespread use of mobile smart devices and wearables has the potential to change how clinical research is conceptualized and conducted. Participants’ data may now be leveraged for a variety of health purposes, including the development of remote screening and diagnostic tools, early intervention programs, and the promotion of public health. While these developments can make research participation less burdensome, they also raise ethical and regulatory challenges around acceptable levels of privacy risk, necessary precautions for safeguarding participants’ confidentiality, and the optimal approach to risk mitigation. The promises and potential barriers to integrating mobile devices and wearable technologies in clinical trial workflows was the focus of the May 2, 2019, meeting of the MRCT Center Bioethics Collaborative. View Summary >
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Adaptive and platform trials may promise greater efficiency and scientific sophistication, but they also raise ethical questions about the principles of informed consent, clinical equipoise, and justice, in addition to practical challenges. Attendees engaged and expanded upon these ethical issues and considered strategies for addressing the theoretical and practical challenges they raise for investigators, sponsors, IRBs, participants, and other stakeholders.
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Massachusetts
02199United States
Pragmatic clinical trials (PCTs) compare or assess interventions in real-world practice settings, hoping to deliver data on effectiveness and safety that more closely resembles clinical care than explanatory clinical trials that focus on demonstrating efficacy in a highly controlled setting. PCTs obscure the distinction between research and clinical care more than traditional randomized control trials (RCTs), which in turn raises novel ethical questions concerning informed consent, data privacy, incidental findings, and other issues.
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised novel ethical issues and intensified existing ones in clinical research. From the abundance of ethical issues, the MRCT Center identified 3 topics to initiate discussion at the June 1st Bioethics Collaborative: 1) clinical equipoise and the standard-of-care for COVID-19 research, 2) clinical trial prioritization amidst a scarcity of resources, and 3) the role of the Institutional Review Board in COVID-19 research. Attendees guided discussion beyond these issues over the course of the Bioethics Collaborative.
Ethical questions relating to the work of patient advocates in clinical research have been given insufficient attention. What experience and training must a person have to participate in patient engagement in clinical research? What does it mean for an advocate to be representative, and to what extent are advocates expected to represent the full range of perspectives of patients with the condition or that may be impacted by the proposed research? Are there conflicts of interest (financial and otherwise) that affect patient engagement in clinical research, and if so, how can they be managed?
