Description: Barbara Bierer, Ava Glazier, and Willyanne DeCormier Plosky published “Disclosure of Pregnancy-Related Privacy Risks in Clinical Research Post-Dobbs” in NEJM Evidence. The review examines how routine clinical research practices — such as pregnancy testing, contraception requirements, and incidental pregnancy reporting — have created new privacy risks for participants, clinicians, and investigators following the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision and offers practical guidance for investigators and IRBs navigating this shifting legal landscape.
The MRCT Center held its Annual Symposium on October 22, 2025, hosting 100 people in Boston and 580 people virtually. Sessions focused on concrete implementation challenges in global clinical trials, including how to modernize trial operations, reduce inefficiencies, alleviate site and participant burden, reimagine informed consent as an enabling participant-centered process, and adopt the responsible use of AI. The MRCT Center Long-Term Follow-Up Toolkit was introduced.
John F. Crowley, President & CEO, Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) A call for regulatory modernization, trial simplification, and cross-sector partnership to sustain innovation and expand equitable access to medicines worldwide.
Kevin Bugin (Amgen); Karen Hartman (Mayo Clinic); Bridgette René McCullough (ACIRAH Health); Ann Meeker-O’Connell (Novartis) Practical reforms to reduce protocol complexity and site burden, standardize systems, accelerate start-up, and expand patient access through adaptive and decentralized trial designs.
Sarah White, Executive Director, MRCT Center Repositioning the MRCT Center to remain nimble and opportunistic amid regulatory, technological, and operational uncertainty through focused work on access, innovative trial design, data use and protection, patient-centered approaches, responsive forums, global capacity building, and artificial intelligence.
Michael Cohen-Wolkowiez (Duke University); Megan Doerr (Sage Bionetworks); Cristin Freeman (Bristol Myers Squibb) Real-world applications of AI to enhance informed consent, focusing on participant-centered, scalable, and feasible innovation, while respecting ethical and regulatory expectations.
Willyanne DeCormier Plosky; Sarah White; Sylvia Baedorf Kassis; Lisa Koppelman; Barbara Bierer (MRCT Center) Implementation updates on Representation in Research, capacity building through the TRACE Project, workforce competency standards (JTF), pediatric research, and the European Health Data Space.
Save the date: The 2026 MRCT Center Annual Symposium will take place on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, in Boston. An agenda will be shared in the coming months.
Available now on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and all streaming platforms. Subscribe to the MRCT Center Podcast to see the full library of conversations.
Across 3 video-based modules, paired with interactive case studies and activities, learners will gain practical, in-depth guidance on providing ethical oversight of health-related research involving human participants. By the end of the course, learners will be able to explain how a Research Ethics Committee (REC) provides oversight from initial review through study closure; articulate why robust Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are essential to REC operations; describe the roles and responsibilities of other stakeholders involved in clinical research oversight; and identify methods to assess and strengthen REC operations.
Presented on: October 22, 2025, at the MRCT Center Annual Symposium
Long-Term Follow-Up (LTFU) studies are critical for understanding the long-term safety and risk/benefit profile of innovative cell and gene therapies. Study participants, patients, treating clinicians, companies, regulators, payers, and society-at-large all derive different value from LTFU studies. However, these studies present unique challenges due to their unprecedented duration. For sponsors, they are challenging and expensive to design, conduct, and operationalize. For patients, LTFU participation can be burdensome in terms of time, expense, and opportunity costs.
In this recorded panel, which was held during the MRCT Center’s Annual Symposium in October 2025, Dr. Carolyn Chapman describes the aims of the Center’s LTFU Working Group, which was launched in September 2024 and benefited from the perspectives of 25 members from outside the Center. Dr. Chapman also previews the release of the LTFU Toolkit, which was collaboratively developed by the Working Group. The Toolkit offers practical guidance to support best practices for LTFU studies for both investigational and approved gene therapies.
In this session, Dr. Chapman leads a discussion with three distinguished industry leaders on a variety of issues addressed in the LTFU Toolkit. These include integrating decentralized elements to reduce burden, refining endpoint selection, harmonizing data for interoperability across LTFU studies, and minimizing loss to follow-up through participant engagement and clear communication. They also highlight the need for flexibility in LTFU study designs to meet evolving patient needs, and the importance of keeping new and current participants informed about protocol changes and any key findings. Looking ahead, the group calls for ongoing dialogue on data harmonization and sharing, results transparency, and innovative approaches to streamline the collection of long-term safety information.
𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿: Carolyn Riley Chapman, PhD, MS – Lead Investigator, Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Member of the Faculty, Harvard Medical School
Panelists:
Pamela Tenaerts, MD, MBA, Chief Medical Officer, Medable
Long-term follow-up (LTFU) studies of gene therapy (GT) recipients are crucial for understanding the overall benefit-risk profile of these innovative products. However, LTFU studies are challenging to design, conduct, and execute, and pose significant burdens on both patients and sponsors.
The MRCT Center CGT Toolkit is comprehensive and provides background information, practical resources, and recommendations to support best practices for LTFU studies for both investigational and approved gene therapies—balancing the generation of critical long-term safety and efficacy data with the need to reduce burdens placed on participants, caregivers, sponsors, and investigators.
Compared to the draft version, the updated Toolkit v2.0 includes two new resources, an Executive Summary and a Patient Resource, which have also been released as standalone versions. Additions included new and/or revised charts, tables, and resources. The Toolkit explores ideas for how LTFU studies could be improved in the future, raising questions that the field should discuss and address.
The Toolkit enables easy navigation to various sections and subsections via multiple clickable, interactive toolbars. The sections are as follows, with the core elements in bold font:
The Toolkit incorporates several interactive features designed to support intuitive navigation and ease of use:
Clickable Table of Contents for rapid access to major sections and subsections.
Right-hand vertical navigation bar on every page, enabling quick movement between tools within the document.
Interactive table of LTFU study types, mirrored by color-coded tabs that remain clickable throughout the associated pages.
Secondary navigation bar at the top of each page within the Considerations & Recommendations section. This feature highlights your location within the nine subsections, allows you to jump directly between subsections by clicking the dots, and includes a grey diamond icon that returns you to the full list of subsections.
Comments provided to: TEHDAS2, coordinated by the Finnish Innovation Fund SITRA
Description:The MRCT Center and Vivli co-host an ongoing, invite-only forum focused on the European Health Data Space (EHDS), bringing together stakeholders to track developments and coordinate responses. The MRCT Center submitted responses to three TEHDAS2 guidance documents offered for public consultation to Health Data Access Bodies:
This meeting was presented to the Bioethics Collaborative. The Bioethics Collaborative is a forum to propose, share, and discuss ethical challenges in multi-national clinical trials. Meetings convene individuals from academia, industry, patient/participant groups, ethics committees, government, and others.
Abstract: Since funding and other resources for clinical research are limited, decisions must be made about which research projects to pursue, which not to pursue, and how to prioritize among the studies that are chosen. The principle of “unmet medical need” is often acknowledged as a guiding consideration in this context, and there have been calls for community input into prioritization and the choice of the study question. Further, addressing unmet medical needs, particularly in the context of the global burden of disease, is important for public health but may not, and likely will not, maximize market opportunity or financial profits – a dynamic that is particularly salient for private industry sponsors. Should prioritization then rest solely or principally with the funder? How should such entities balance economic obligations toward shareholders with the public good?
One salient principle of distributive justice is “prioritarianism,” the idea that research that stands to benefit the worse-off or those who are already underprivileged should be given priority over research that stands to benefit people in better situations: the well-being of the most disadvantaged is prioritized. Even prior to this, however, questions arise over how to understand the expected goods of research, who the beneficiaries might be, and how the well-being of different possible beneficiary groups should be measured. Further downstream, issues arise over who should engage in prioritization decisions, and in particular, whether the research community should rely solely on high-level, centralized prioritization mechanisms (e.g., industry sponsors, NIH, non-profit funders), or whether individual institutions, local communities, and/or patients and their allies might have some role to play in ensuring that studies are appropriately prioritized at a local level. How should these various voices be heard, should they be represented, and how can—or should—balance be achieved, and if so, what processes should be considered? The March Bioethics Collaborative will seek to address these and other issues in connection with the ethics of research priority-setting.
This meeting was presented to the Bioethics Collaborative. The Bioethics Collaborative is a forum to propose, share, and discuss ethical challenges in multi-national clinical trials. Meetings convene individuals from academia, industry, patient/participant groups, ethics committees, government, and others.
Abstract: The lines between research and care continue to blur. Pragmatic research studies comparing accepted therapies are increasingly embedded seamlessly into clinical practice. More and more, participation in research deemed promising is offered to patients before standard therapies are exhausted, sometimes as a first-line option. While the concept of “therapeutic misconception”—in very broad strokes, the tendency for individuals to misapply attributes of clinical care to research—has been a mainstay of research ethics for over 40 years, these developments provide an occasion, and perhaps even an urgent need, to revisit it and related topics. How exactly should we understand the therapeutic misconception and what it involves, particularly in cases where the line between research and care really is vague and hard to determine? Even more basically, how should we understand the relationship between research and care in the first place? Are concerns over therapeutic misconception still important, or do they perhaps reflect naïve understandings of research and care and the relation between them–particularly in cases where current options are limited?
