FDA Launches a Pilot Program to Inform Patient Reported Outcomes from Cancer Clinical Trials

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today launched Project Patient Voice, an initiative of the FDA’s Oncology Center of Excellence (OCE). Through a new website, Project Patient Voice creates a consistent source of publicly available information describing patient-reported symptoms from cancer trials for marketed treatments. While this patient-reported data has historically been analyzed by the FDA during the drug approval process, it is rarely included in product labeling and, therefore, is largely inaccessible to the public.

Project patient voice has been initiated by the oncology Center of excellence to give patients and health care professionals unique information on symptomatic side effects to better inform their treatment choices,” said FDA principal deputy commissioner Amy Abernethy, M.D., Ph.D. “the project patient voice pilot is a significant step in advancing a patient-centered approach to oncology drug development. Where patient-reported symptom information is collected rigorously, this information should be readily available to patients.

Patient-reported outcome (PRO) data is collected using questionnaires that patients complete during clinical trials. These questionnaires are designed to capture important information about disease- or treatment-related symptoms. This includes how severe or how often a symptom or side effect occurs.

Patient-reported data can provide additional, complementary information for health care professionals to discuss with patients, specifically when discussing the potential side effects of a particular cancer treatment. In contrast to the clinician-reported safety data in product labeling, the data in Project Patient Voice is obtained directly from patients and can show symptoms before treatment starts and at multiple time points while receiving cancer treatment.

The Project Patient Voice website will include a list of cancer clinical trials that have available patient-reported symptom data. Each trial will include a table of the patient-reported symptoms collected. Each patient-reported symptom can be selected to display a series of bar and pie charts describing the patient-reported symptom at baseline (before treatment starts) and over the first 6 months of treatment. This information provides insights into side effects not currently available in standard FDA safety tables, including existing symptoms before the start of treatment, symptoms over time, and the subset of patients who did not have a particular symptom prior to starting treatment.

In the first phase of this pilot website, only one trial will be included while the FDA seeks public feedback on how the information is presented. The FDA will use this feedback to consider improvements to the website in order to make the information as user-friendly as possible.

The visualizations and data included on the website are voluntarily provided by the drug companies that conducted the clinical trials. AstraZeneca is the first company to provide patient-reported outcome data for one of their FDA-approved drugs and has collaborated with the FDA to identify methods to display the information in a way that is informative to health care professionals and patients.

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