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 […]

How many times have you heard a reference to “The Beecher Report”? This report is considered a foundational document underpinning human research ethics, but it’s unclear how many of us who work in human subject research have had a chance to actually read and discuss it. Because we want to give the UAMS human research […]

HIPAA regulations require certain safeguards for electronic access to and storage of Protected Health Information (PHI). The following platforms are HIPAA compliant, per a list provided by The People Who Handle These Things. (We got the list from the UAMS Office of Research Compliance (ORC), but we can’t remember who, exactly, gave the list to […]

Preliminary results from a COVID challenge trial involving 36 young adults should this trial design appears safe, according to a recent Reuters article. Challenge trials, in which participants are deliberately exposed to an agent that can make them ill, raise questions of whether such a trial design is ethical. One camp argues challenge trials are […]