By: Francis Kalush, Ph.D.
Horace, the greatest Roman poet of antiquity, spoke of the need to “seek for truth in the groves of Academe” — and in the last four years, my colleagues in FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) and I took his advice. In scores of meetings and two large workshops, we consulted with hundreds of academics about a novel idea: a university-level program to address an important public health need by stimulating the development of new medical devices.
In 2011, CDRH embarked on an Innovation Initiative to help accelerate and reduce the cost of the development and regulatory evaluation of safe and innovative medical devices. Through that and other programs, we learned that the delivery of new therapies to patients can be accelerated if medical device innovators — including entrepreneurs and university students and faculty — understand FDA’s regulatory processes. We then established the Medical Device Technology Innovation Partnership, and tasked it with developing an educational program that would explain FDA’s standards and procedures for evaluating and approving or clearing medical devices.
This learning tool grew from collaborations with Stanford University, University of Virginia, Howard University, The Johns Hopkins University, University of Maryland at College Park and at Baltimore, and University of Pennsylvania.
The program, called the National Medical Device Curriculum, will provide students at academic institutions and science and technology innovators with the core information about the regulatory pathway to market. This includes an understanding of the expertise needed to design, test and clinically evaluate devices; identify the root causes of adverse events and device malfunctions; develop designs for devices with repetitive functions; and, navigate FDA’s regulatory process.
The mode of the curriculum is a series of fictional case studies based on real-world medical device scenarios. The four learning tools developed so far cover the following subjects: the regulatory pathways for medical devices; safety assurance and risk management planning; and the regulatory pathways for novel devices and for devices that are substantially equivalent to already marketed predicate devices.
Each of these fictionalized case studies includes a student module and an instructor’s guide with ideas for exercises and discussion in class. The curriculum was tested at several universities and received high praise. For example:
- William E. Bentley, from the University of Maryland James Clark School of Engineering found that the case studies “are of tremendous pedagogical value, and we are definitely incorporating them into our curriculum.”
- Arthur L. Rosenthal, Ph.D., a professor at Boston University’s College of Engineering, used the case studies to teach advanced biomedical product design and development and reported that “the students found the material engaging as well as providing essential context for their projects.”
- Youseph Yasdi, Ph.D., MBA, executive director at The Johns Hopkins Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design, found that the cases are “a good fit” for his program to train engineers to better understand regulatory issues.
More case studies are being planned to help train the next generation of entrepreneurs and keep the U.S. a leader in medical device innovation. Regulatory training is particularly important in the development of medical devices, as the industry is heavily populated by small companies that may not have the expertise to navigate FDA’s requirements.
The National Medical Device Curriculum is a step forward in our Agency’s efforts to encourage and facilitate the development of new medical products — drugs, biological products and medical devices — that has been made possible by the great scientific breakthroughs in the last two decades, such as the mapping of the human genome and the invention of nanotechnology. Those of us who worked on this novel curriculum hope it will encourage and advance the development of new devices for patients and help protect and promote the public health.
Francis Kalush, Ph.D., is a senior science advisor at FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health
– See more at: http://blogs.fda.gov/fdavoice/index.php/2014/07/a-curriculum-for-medical-device-progress/#sthash.oxQLuW5W.dpuf
