To minimize the delays in approving new submissions, modifications, and continuing reviews, the UAMS Institutional Review Board will no longer send contingencies about a study staffer not having current Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) training. Instead, the Institutional Review Board will send a note reminding the team that this staffer does not have Institutional Review […]

It was a half-century ago that the public first learned of the extent of the Tuskegee syphilis study, despite its having gone on for decades and journal articles about it being published as early as 1926. Author Martin J. Tobin recounts the story of this study and of another U.S. Public Health Service (PHS)-led study […]

We’ve made updates to the document we’ve created to help study teams complete local context forms (for xIRB studies) and site-specific forms for sponsors. The form now contains links to policies relevant to certain topics, and we’ve added language to the “Children in Research” section describing wards of the state. You can access the form […]

The UAMS Institutional Review Board has updated its policy 17.1, Children in Research. We have added language to increase flexibility on parental permission requirements for research not subject to federal regulations. Specifically, this policy revision codifies the Institutional Review Board’s flexibility to consider requiring only one parent’s permission for a child to participate in research […]

Big news! We are thrilled to announce the expected speaker lineup at the next meeting of our Research Ethics Book and Journal Club. The book we’ll talk about is “Chasing My Cure.” The best part? Our scheduled speakers are Dr. David Fajgenbaum, who wrote the book, and our very own Dr. Frits van Rhee, who figures […]

Research, health care, and science all keep racing ahead, and human research protection programs keep trying to keep up. Studies involving development and testing of machine learning/artificial intelligence projects that use software were just not on most institutional review boards’ radar 10-15 years ago, but now they’re here, and we are learning how to best […]

Institutional review board staff and reviewers (and plenty of others, too) lie awake at night thinking about the ethical implications of research involving genomic data. While we all tend to worry about the identifiability of such data, genomic research can create large, population-wide considerations. Population descriptors used in genomic research can be one factor leading […]

The distance between researchers in the lab and the patients who benefit from research findings used to feel like a Grand Canyon-sized gap. However, over the past few decades, at least as far back as the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, patients have played an growing role in research development and making research results available […]

Because we try to keep things simple at the IRB (or maybe we’re just simple folk), we’re thrilled to announce that we have created a resource that contains information that industry sponsors and external IRBs tend to ask for as we start up our site in multi-site studies. We’ve collated the responses to the questions […]

We’ve talked to the IRB Blog Central Archivist, and given her a stern talking-to about posting the slides from our IRB member trainings. Below are slides from education sessions that have continuing relevance. (Yes, every topic is relevant, but some, such as courses related to preparation for the AAHRPP site visit, have less long-term relevance than […]