Improving informed consent: Icon and Carnegie Mellon test short consent process

Shorter, more concise informed consent materials can help patients make fully-formed decisions about clinical trial participation without sacrificing any of the essential information required by institutional review boards (IRBs), according to recent research from Carnegie Mellon University, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Dublin, Ireland-based Icon.

Launch of Genomic Data Commons marks ‘end of the beginning’

Last week Vice President Joe Biden launched the first open access data system for sharing cancer tumor and clinical data—a step he called “critical” in the White House’s Cancer Moonshot and Precision Medicine Initiative efforts to accelerate the pace of cancer drug discovery. Named the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Genomic Data Commons (GDC), the new data platform is poised to speed drug devel­opment by “increasing the pool of researchers who can access data and decreasing the time it takes for them to review and find new pat­terns,” said Vice President Biden.

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