Funded by National Institutes of Health
Funding Years: 2015-2018
Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) provide oversight to clinical research involving human subjects to protect participants and ensure ethical research conduct. Local IRBs review research performed just at their own site, while Central Institutional Review Boards (CIRBs) review research being conducted at many sites. Regardless of whether reviews are performed locally or centrally, they must take into account any local context specific to the site where the research will be performed. CIRBs may provide more effective, equitable, and efficient review of large multicenter clinical trials, but whether CIRBs can effectively consider local context is unknown. Local context review is especially important in a kind of research called exception from informed consent for emergency research. In this kind of research, patients who are comatose or otherwise critically ill and unable to consent for themselves may still participate in trials if thir condition is life-threatening and the experimental therapy is only effective if given right away. To perform this kind of trial, researchers must also consult with the community and publically disclose information about the study. Information about those consultations must then be considered by an IRB as part of local context review. The purpose of this project is to explore, revise, and test measures of local context review of community consultation for this type of research, by local and central IRBs. We will work with key stakeholders to identify goals and processes, use these data to develop measures in domains such as trustworthiness and acceptability, and then use these measures to compare local IRB reviews to those of a simulated CIRB for a real trial. This project will be conducted within the Neurological Emergencies Treatment Trials (NETT) network and the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN). These networks will serve as an "empirical ethics lab" in which best practices are developed.
PI(s): Robert Silbergleit
Co-I(s): Michael Fetters, Michael Geisser, Adrianne Haggins, Alan Sugar, Sacha Montas