Nina L. Hunter, Ph.D., a Regulatory Scientist in FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, currently on detail as a Special Assistant for Medical Policy to the Office of Medical Products and Tobacco.
By Nina L. Hunter, Ph.D. and Robert M. Califf, M.D.
We recently announced the first FDA Patient Engagement Advisory Committee (PEAC), supported by the Center of Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH). The Committee will provide advice to the FDA Commissioner on complex issues relating to medical devices, the regulation of devices, and their use by patients. The PEAC will bring patients, patient advocacy groups, and experts together for a broader discussion of important patient-related issues, to increase integration of patient perspectives into the regulatory process, and to help drive more patient-centric medical device innovation, development, evaluation, and access.
With the PEAC offering an important avenue for patient views to be incorporated in the assessment of new medical devices, complementary programs in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) and the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) are continuing to explore multiple approaches to patient involvement in development programs for drugs and biologic products, respectively. The Patient-Focused Drug Development (PFDD) Program, led by Dr. Theresa Mullin, provides a way for scientists from across the Agency to obtain patients’ input on specific disease areas, including their perspectives on their condition, its impact on daily life, and available therapies. As part of this program, FDA is holding a series of public meetings, each focused on a specific disease area. Outcomes of these meetings include detailed descriptions of patient perspectives on the most significant symptoms and treatments.
While FDA continues our work on patient engagement through our newly formed advisory committee and the PFDD Program, public-private partnerships (PPPs) are key to empowering patients across the spectrum of medical product development and evaluation. Here we will describe three such important partnerships.
FDA is a founding member of the Medical Device Innovation Consortium (MDIC), a PPP created with the objective of advancing medical device regulatory science. MDIC recently issued a catalog of available methods that can be used for collecting data on patient preferences, along with a framework for considering how to incorporate patient preferences across the total lifecycle of a device. The ultimate goal is to use these data to guide the development, assessment, and delivery of medical devices that better meet patients’ needs. As the scientific evidence and methodological approaches in this area mature, FDA will continue to collaborate with others on efforts to collect and use patient preference data for regulatory purposes.
Robert M. Califf, M.D., FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Medical Products and Tobacco.
Like the MDIC, the Kidney Health Initiative (KHI) is a PPP that includes representatives from the FDA, healthcare professional societies, patient groups, and the medical products industry. Recently, KHI convened a workshop under the leadership of Dr. Frank Hurst and Ms. Carolyn Neuland, with patients, care partners, scientists, doctors, nurses, technicians, companies, and FDA, to hear discussions about the issues that patients with kidney diseases consider most important. More than 80 patients attended this workshop; many of these were not members of an organized patient advocacy group, but instead individuals truly driven to improve the plight of all patients with kidney disease. CDRH and CDER are working with the KHI to advance scientific understanding of the implications for patient health and safety posed by new and existing medical products, as well as fostering development of new therapies for kidney diseases. This PPP creates a transparent infrastructure and processes that facilitate collaboration and communication among the greater Nephrology community and FDA.
FDA has also held several meetings with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) throughout the PROMIS initiative, including the Patient Reported Outcome Consortium. PROMIS aims to provide clinicians and researchers access to efficient, precise, valid, and responsive patient-reported measures of health and well-being. PROMIS measures can be used as primary or secondary endpoints in clinical studies of the effectiveness of treatment, and PROMIS tools can be used across a wide variety of chronic diseases and conditions and in the general population. These tools pertain to all medical products, and they can be used to understand the burden of their disease and impacts of treatment on how patients feel and function in their daily lives, so that appropriate patient-centered outcome assessments can be developed and integrated into clinical trials to produce meaningful data to guide treatment decisions. Specifically at CDRH, the use of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) in regulatory submissions has increased significantly, with approximately 20 submissions per year citing PROMs prior to FDA’s guidance on the topic, to over 120 last year alone. This jump indicates significant interest by industry and clinical researchers in generating patient-centered evidence from studies done for regulatory purposes.
FDA is ready to advance the science of patient input and work with a wider community of patients, clinicians, and social science researchers in a collaborative way. We expect the number of partnerships with patients and their caregivers to grow, and the effort to become more effective as the underlying science and cultural understanding continues to develop.
This article was originally published on FDA Voice and is reprinted here with permission.