The European Medicines Agency (EMA) in 2017 issued a revised guideline on nonclinical and clinical aspects of first-in-human (FIH) and early clinical trials (CTs). External input was solicited during a draft comment phase, and although some industry suggestions were adopted, others were not. We agree that subject safety is of utmost priority, and believe that minimizing risk must be balanced with efficient and informative study designs to bring new medicines to patients.
A significant regulatory gap exists to facilitate global development of therapeutics for nononcology severely debilitating or life‐threatening diseases or conditions (SDLTs). In a 2017 publication, a streamlined approach to the development of treatments for SDLTs was proposed to facilitate earlier and continued patient access to new, potentially beneficial therapeutics.1 However, a major hindrance to broad adoption of this streamlined approach has been the lack of universally accepted, objective criteria to define SDLTs. This article serves to extend the 2017 publication by further addressing the challenge of defining SDLT scope in order to stimulate broader discussion and facilitate development of regional and ultimately international guidelines on the development of therapeutics for SDLTs. Using case examples, we describe key attributes of SDLTs and provide criteria for consideration of an SDLT scope definition.
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