Capturing Data in Rare Disease Registries to Support Regulatory Decision Making: A Survey Study Among Industry and Other Stakeholders

Introduction

In rare diseases, registry-based studies can be used to provide natural history data pre-approval and complement drug efficacy and/or safety knowledge post-approval.

Objective

The objective of this study was to investigate the opinion of stakeholders about key aspects of rare disease registries that are used to support regulatory decision making and to compare the responses of employees from industry to other stakeholders.

Methods

A web-based survey was used to gauge the importance of (1) common data elements (including safety outcomes), (2) data quality and (3) governance aspects that are generic across different rare diseases. The survey included 47 questions. The data were collected in the period April-October 2019.

Results

Seventy-three respondents completed ≥ 80% of the survey. Most of the respondents were from the industry (n = 42, 57%). For safety data, 31 (42%) respondents were in favour of collecting all adverse events. For data quality, the respondents found a level of 30% reasonable for source data verification. For missing data, a level of 20% was considered acceptable. Compared to responders from industry, the other stakeholders found it less relevant to share data with industry and found it less acceptable if the registry is financed by industry.

Conclusions

This study showed that the opinion towards data and governance is well aligned across parties, and issues of data and governance on their own should not pose a barrier to collaboration. This finding is supportive of the European Medicines Agency’s efforts to encourage stakeholders to work with existing registries when collecting data to support regulatory decision making.