Barriers and facilitators to designing, maintaining, and utilizing rare disease patient registries: a scoping review protocol.

Objective: The objectives of this review are to identify barriers/facilitators to designing, maintaining, and utilizing rare disease patient registries (RDPRs); determine whether and how these differ among patient partners, other knowledge users (KUs), and researchers; and chart definitions of rare diseases and RDPRs.

Introduction: RDPRs are vital to improving the understanding of the natural histories and predictors of outcomes for rare diseases, assessing interventions, and identifying potential participants for clinical trials. Currently, however, the functionality of RDPRs is not fully optimized.

The IRDiRC Chrysalis Task Force: making rare disease research attractive to companies.

Background: The International Rare Diseases Research Consortium (IRDiRC) is an international initiative that aims to use research to facilitate rapid diagnosis and treatment of rare diseases.

Objective: IRDiRC launched the Chrysalis Task Force to identify key financial and nonfinancial factors that make rare disease research and development attractive to companies.

Methods: The Chrysalis Task Force was comprised of thought leaders from companies, patient advocacy groups, regulatory agencies, and research funders.

How can we deliver on the promise of precision medicine in oncology and beyond? A practical roadmap for action.

Background: Precision medicine (PM) is a form of personalized medicine that recognizes that individuals with the same condition may have different underlying factors and uses molecular information to provide tailored treatments. This approach can improve treatment outcomes and transform lives through favorable risk/benefit ratios, avoidance of ineffective interventions, and possible cost savings, as evidenced in the field of lung cancer and other oncology/therapeutic settings, including cardiac disease, diabetes, and rare diseases. However, the potential benefits of PM have yet to be fully realized.

Developing a Framework of Cost Elements of Socioeconomic Burden of Rare Disease: A Scoping Review.

Background And Objective: Rare diseases place a significant burden on patients, families, the healthcare system, and society. Evidence on the socioeconomic burden of rare disease is limited and mostly reflects diseases where treatments are available. We developed a framework encompassing recommended cost elements for studies of the socioeconomic burden of rare diseases.

An international comparative analysis of public reimbursement of orphan drugs in Canadian provinces compared to European countries.

Background: The Canadian government has committed to developing a national strategy for drugs for rare diseases starting in 2022. Considering this announcement, we conducted a comparative analysis to examine patient access to therapies for rare disease in Canada relative to Europe and the U.S.

Essential list of medicinal products for rare diseases: recommendations from the IRDiRC Rare Disease Treatment Access Working Group.

Background: Treatments are often unavailable for rare disease patients, especially in low-and-middle-income countries. Reasons for this include lack of financial support for therapies and onerous regulatory requirements for approval of drugs. Other barriers include lack of reimbursement, administrative infrastructure, and knowledge about diagnosis and drug treatment options.

Model consent clauses for rare disease research.

Background: Rare Disease research has seen tremendous advancements over the last decades, with the development of new technologies, various global collaborative efforts and improved data sharing. To maximize the impact of and to further build on these developments, there is a need for model consent clauses for rare diseases research, in order to improve data interoperability, to meet the informational needs of participants, and to ensure proper ethical and legal use of data sources and participants' overall protection.

Methods: A global Task Force was set up to develop model consent clauses specific to rare diseases research, that are comprehensive, harmonized, readily accessible, and internationally applicable, facilitating the recruitment and consent of rare disease research participants around the world.

Familial hypercholesterolaemia patient support groups and advocacy: A multinational perspective.

Familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH) is an autosomal-dominant disorder associated with high low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C). Left untreated, 50% of men with FH will develop coronary heart disease by the age of 50 and 30% of women by the age 60 [1,2]. It is estimated that the prevalence may be as high as one in 250 people, with most undiagnosed.

Review of 11 national policies for rare diseases in the context of key patient needs.

Rare diseases collectively exert a global public health burden in the severity of their manifestations and the total number of people they afflict. For many patients, considerable barriers exist in terms of access to appropriate care, delayed diagnosis and limited or non-existing treatment options. Motivated by these challenges, the rare disease patient community has played a critical role, elevating the patient voice and mobilizing legislation to support the development of programs that address the needs of patients with rare diseases.

Moving from Patient Advocacy to Partnership: A Long and Bumpy Road.

Real-life experiences of grassroots patient organizations across a variety of diseases, countries and contexts have been used to develop a four-mode framework of the transition from patient advocacy to partnership, defined by one axis as individual versus collective action and the other axis as activities 'outside' or 'inside' the system. The four quadrants are labeled as advocacy, activism, reform and broker, and engagement is further refined by whether the participation is 'pushed' by the group or 'pulled' by the system. There are many examples of patient advocacy groups transitioning through the four quadrants; however, depending on other factors of culture, opportunity and their own preferences, groups may work primarily through one or two quadrants.

ASPECTS OF PATIENT REPORTED OUTCOMES IN RARE DISEASES: A DISCUSSION PAPER.

Objectives: A patient reported outcome (PRO) is "any report of the status of a patient's health condition that comes directly from the patient without interpretation of the patient's response by a clinician or anyone else" (USFDA 2009). PROs are discussed widely, and many regard the patients' perspective on treatment benefit as very valuable. Although many PROs have shown satisfactory measurement properties including reliability, validity, and responsiveness, there is great concern about risk of bias, that is, in clinical trials.

Developing a patient-directed policy framework for managing orphan and ultra-orphan drugs throughout their lifecycle.

Introduction: Policy decisions related to orphan and ultra-orphan drugs challenge traditional decision-making processes and often frustrate those affected by them. In general, these drugs are associated with significant uncertainties around clinical benefit, 'value for money', affordability, and 'adoption/diffusion', all of which arise from a lack of available high-quality evidence. Increasingly, patients with rare diseases and their families are looking for opportunities to contribute to initiatives aimed at reducing these uncertainties.

Generating health technology assessment evidence for rare diseases.

Objectives: Rare diseases are often heterogeneous in their progression and response to treatment, with only a small population for study. This provides challenges for evidence generation to support HTA, so novel research methods are required.

Methods: Discussion with an expert panel was augmented with references and case studies to explore robust approaches for HTA evidence generation for rare disease treatments.

A call for action to improve access to care and treatment for patients with rare diseases in the Asia-Pacific region.

This article is a call for action to the relevant stakeholders to improve access to care and treatment for patients with rare diseases in the Asia-Pacific region by looking into three main areas: (a) developing legislative definitions to confer enforceable protection, (b) creating or strengthening policies by objectively measuring the impact brought about by rare diseases and establishing platforms to reach out to the rare disease community, and (c) fostering collaboration across sectors and countries. It is hoped that these suggested actions can catalyze discussions and progress in the region.

Quality indicators as a tool in improving the introduction of new medicines.

Quality indicators are increasingly used as a tool to achieve safe and quality clinical care, cost-effective therapy, for professional learning, remuneration, accreditation and financial incentives. A substantial number focus on drug therapy but few address the introduction of new medicines even though this is a burning issue. The objective was to describe the issues and challenges in designing and implementing a transparent indicator framework and evaluation protocol for the introduction of new medicines and to provide guidance on how to apply quality indicators in the managed entry of new medicines.

Returning incidental findings from genetic research to children: views of parents of children affected by rare diseases.

Purpose: To explore parental perceptions and experiences regarding the return of genomic incidental research findings in children with rare diseases.

Methods: Parents of children affected by various rare diseases were invited to participate in focus groups or individual telephone interviews in Montreal and Ottawa. Fifteen participants were interviewed and transcriptions were analysed using thematic analysis.

Validation and reliability of a disease-specific quality of life measure (the TranQol) in adults and children with thalassaemia major.

This study aimed to demonstrate the validity, reliability and responsiveness of a new disease-specific quality of life (QoL) questionnaire for children and adults with thalassaemia major, the Transfusion-dependent QoL questionnaire (TranQol). 106 participants (51 adults and 55 children) were recruited from six North American thalassaemia treatment centres with a mean age of 20·7 years (standard deviation [SD] 9, range 7-51 years). The mean total TranQol score was 71 (SD 17, 32-97) on a scale of 0-100.