A New Mechanism for Tracking Publicly Available Study Volunteer Demographics

The importance of gathering and monitoring aggregate demographic data on the annual population of study volunteers in FDA-regulated clinical trials is widely acknowledged. To date, no formal mechanism exists to capture this information. The Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development identified and tested a publicly available source of information on clinical trial participant data, NDA Reviews stored in the FDA's drugs@FDA database, to determine its accuracy, reliability, and feasibility. Thirty-seven new drug applications approved between 2006 and 2008 were evaluated and compared with published sources of demographic data. The authors conclude that the approach described here-NDA review extraction-provides reasonably reliable and conservative estimates of study volunteer demographics and can serve as a useful baseline until Clinicaltrials.gov or other, more complete, public sources become available.