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The Vice President's Office for Research at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA, has developed a formal process for investigators who wish to appeal an IRB determination.
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A recent lawsuit against Brown University in Providence, RI, is an important sign that it's time for research institutions to create formal appeals processes in the event of contested IRB review decisions.
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As a research institution's human subjects research increases, so must an IRB's work. In some cases this means expanding to handling multicenter protocols, which bring may result in new challenges.
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IRB offices routinely handle protocol submissions that are incomplete or flawed in other fundamental ways. These problems cause roadblocks that slow down the IRB approval process and frustrate investigators and IRB staff alike.
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When internal job mobility is stagnated, it can result in high staff turnover rates a problem no IRB wants to experience.
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IRB professionals might not have gotten into the business of protecting human subjects because of their love for mathematics and statistics. But many now are finding that tracking data and analyzing numbers helps them do their job better.
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IRBs sometimes balk at studies that ask sensitive questions about topics such as sex and violence, based on concerns that participants may find them distressing.
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The state of Michigan has moved forward with its plan to store blood samples left over from screening newborns for medical conditions in a biorepository that will make the deidentified samples available for research.
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Investigators, particularly when they are new to human subjects research, often fail to include all necessary information in their IRB applications because they are unaware of what's required.
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A recent analysis of clinical trials showed that researchers routinely ignored previously published and relevant clinical trials when conducting their own studies.