Training Course: Achieving Data Quality and Integrity in Maximum Containment Laboratories
Current course | Background | Course description | 2019 highlights | FAQs | Scientific publications | Related information
Current course
April 25-29, 2022
Registration deadline: March 25, 2022
There is no cost to attend, but seating is limited, and pre-registration is required. Note that course attendees are invited based upon diversity of roles, responsibilities, and organization. Interested participants will be placed on a waitlist once seats are filled.
Background
FDA helps protect the United States from chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and emerging infectious disease threats by ensuring that medical countermeasures (MCMs—for example, drugs, vaccines, and diagnostic tests) to counter these threats are safe, effective, and secure.
Scientists working to develop MCMs against several high-priority biological threat agents are at high risk of aerosol-transmitted laboratory infection and life-threatening disease, as there are no vaccines or treatments for these agents. Accordingly, much of the work to develop MCMs for these high-priority agents must be done in high and maximum biosafety level (BSL)-4 laboratories to prevent the agents from being released into the environment, and to provide maximum safety for the scientists.
The unique challenges of BSL-4
However, meeting data quality and integrity standards like GLP in a BSL-4 environment is challenging. Current practice is often inconsistent among laboratories due to technological infrastructure, available internal standard operating procedures, level of regulatory awareness, and individual breadth of experience and training. And completing even routine lab tasks in a protective BSL-4 suit can be difficult—imagine, for example, trying to pick up a small item, like a toothpick, while wearing two pairs of thick gloves.
To help address the challenges associated with ensuring data quality and integrity in regulated studies conducted in BSL-4 laboratories to support MCM development, FDA and the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston National Laboratory (UTMB) collaborate to provide an annual training course on how to meet GLP requirements in BSL-4 facilities (“data quality course”).
This popular course offers a unique opportunity for the regulatory and scientific communities to discuss complex issues in an interactive environment and identify and share best practices for ensuring data quality and integrity in BSL-4 facilities.
In addition to UTMB and FDA, other federal partners from the National Interagency Confederation for Biological Research (NICBR) provide support and resources for this course. These partners include:
- From the National Institutes of Health
- Office of the Director
- National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)
- National Cancer Institute (NCI)
- From the Department of Defense
- U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC)
- From the Department of Homeland Security
- National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC)
History and new additions
Since the data quality course began in 2013, it has quickly reached capacity each year. In its first five years, 269 participants completed the course.
In September 2017, the FDA Medical Countermeasures Initiative (MCMi) renewed the grant to continue the data quality course for an additional five years, from 2018-2022. UTMB and FDA will also expand on-demand online offerings, adding data quality-related good clinical practices (GCP) training and other courses to meet the needs of researchers responding to emerging infectious disease outbreaks.
Course description
The week-long, data quality course is designed to help researchers who conduct studies intended to support approval under the Animal Rule, which may be used to grant marketing approval of certain products when human challenge studies would not be ethical or feasible.
The course includes expert lectures and hands-on laboratory activities conducted in BSL-2 and BSL-4 training laboratories to emphasize the differences between biosafety levels, and the complexity of conducting laboratory activities in a BSL-4 environment. An online training module on GLP regulations (21 CFR Part 58) is included as a course pre-requisite. For additional information, visit the official UTMB course website.
Topics covered include:
- Animal Rule regulations, and clinical applications of Animal Rule studies
Assay validation
- BSL-2/3/4 comparison, with hands-on simulations
- BSL-4 equipment, with hands-on work in a BSL-4 training lab
- Disease agent characterization
- GLP regulations
- Good documentation practices
- Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) protocols
- Telemetry
- Supportive care
- Surrogate endpoints
- Testing facility management
- Veterinary pathology
- Integration of quality assurance (QA) in BSL-4 studies
- Advancement of MCMs on the international stage
Learning objectives for participants:
- Determine requirements needed to conduct high-quality studies to develop appropriate MCMs
- Identify criteria used to evaluate MCMs in animal models that reflect human disease
- Examine modern methods to comply with data quality standards when conducting nonclinical studies in maximum containment
The FDA/UTMB collaborative course, “Achieving Data Quality and Integrity in Maximum Containment Laboratories,” was held from April 8-12, 2019. More than fifty scientists and regulators from industry, academia and government attended the 2019 course, predominantly held at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. Participants also attended lectures and tours at BSL-4 laboratories in Fort Detrick at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) and NIAID’s Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Frederick, Maryland.
Lectures covered challenges of Ebola human clinical trials, the Animal Rule, Institutional Animal Care and Use challenges and best practices to achieve GLP in managing BSL-4 laboratory studies. Participants, including international public health agency collaborators, completed practice exercises while wearing full high containment BSL-4 suits.
The 2019 course closed with distinguished faculty, NIAID Director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who discussed the challenges of pandemic preparedness. He oversees an extensive portfolio of basic and applied research to prevent, diagnose, and treat established infectious diseases.
FAQs
FDA welcomes participants from government, industry, and academia. We welcome international participation as well; attendees in previous years have included representatives from international public health agencies. Attendees typically include:
- Policy-makers
- MCM product sponsors (industry)
- Quality assurance personnel
- Regulators
- Reviewers
- Scientists
- Veterinarians
Pre-requisites include GLP and IACUC training that are available to course attendees.
Participants overwhelmingly share that they will apply knowledge gained during this course, ultimately resulting in improved patient and public health outcomes. In recent years, 96% of participants indicated that they would like to attend this course again in the future, and 94% would recommend the course to a colleague.
"The collection of knowledge from the government and industry compiled for this course is unparalleled. For those who work with developing MCMs, this is the most relevant training course that I have ever seen.”
--course participant
There are no registration fees for this FDA-sponsored course, however, seats are limited, and course attendees are invited based upon diversity of roles, responsibilities, and organization. Interested participants will be placed on a waitlist once seats are filled.
Scientific publications
Eitzen M, Jones E, McCowan J, Brasel T. A Cross-Disciplinary Training Program for the Advancement of Medical Countermeasures. Health Secur. 2019 Jul/Aug;17(4):344-351. https://doi.org/10.1089/hs.2019.0032
Poster – Measuring the Success of the UTMB-FDA Course: Achieving Data Quality and Integrity in Maximum Containment Laboratories, presented in August 2017 (PDF, 833 KB)
