The patient, as the person who experiences the disease first-hand, has the most direct and accurate experience of the pain of the disease and the most accurate need for health products. Although there is a vast array of technological means to combat disease and maintain health, the human burden of disease has not been reduced and the health needs of patients have not been fully met. Therefore, "patient-focused drug development" is imperative. Gathering comprehensive information from patients through multiple channels and incorporating this information into the entire drug development process can help ensure that patients’ experiences, perspectives, needs and priorities are taken into account and valued. This article will introduce the concept, development process and the specific problems it faces in patient-focused drug development.
In order to better incorporate patient input in clinical trials, the US Food and Drug Administration has included "patient-focused drug development" in the selection and development of clinical outcome assessments, and formulated a series of guidelines. Based on the third guiding principle, "Selecting, Developing, or Modifying Fit-for-Purpose Clinical Outcome Assessments", this article summarizes the clinical outcome assessments from five aspects: concept, development process, scoring mechanism, interference factors and sensitivity, and introduces four different types of clinical outcome assessments, providing new ideas for "patient-focused drug development" efficacy evaluation in clinical trials.
With the transformation of modern medical models, patient-reported outcomes, clinician-reported outcomes, observer-reported outcomes, and performance outcomes have become internationally recognized clinical outcome assessment indicators, and scales have also become important evaluation tools, among which translation and cross-cultural adaptation are one of the important sources of scales. However, at present, there are fewer guidelines for scale translation in China. At present, domestic scale translation has not yet been unified and standardized in clinical reporting. Most translation reports provide readers with incomplete information, which affects the development of scale translation, and the methodology related to the translation of clinical outcome assessment scales still focuses on patient-reported outcome scales, which creates a gap in terms of the recommendations for the rest of the types of translations, a gap which leads to inconsistencies in the translation methodology and process. In this paper, we will develop specific translation methods and processes for each of the four current types of clinical outcome assessments by combining scale translation guidelines to support a standardized approach to translation, cross-cultural adaptation, and linguistic validation for use in standardizing the process of recommending translations of patient-reported outcome scales, clinical-reported outcome scales, observer-reported outcome scales, and behavioral outcome scales.
To ensure the scientific and recognized evaluation of patient-centered clinical research outcomes, the drug development tool qualification certification website of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research and the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research have disclosed the information of clinical outcome assessment (COA) submitted for certification, and encouraged the use of certified COA. This paper searched all COA and approval decisions on the website, analyzed the submitted information and certification status of COA, and interpreted the certification technology and process of COA, so as to provide references and suggestions for the development of patient-centered clinical research outcome evaluation.