Young patients’ involvement in a composite endpoint method development on acceptability for paediatric oral dosage forms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: In line with the European Paediatric Regulation, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) asks for investigation of a medicine's acceptability in paediatric medicines development. A standardised acceptability testing method combining the outcome of "swallowability" and "palatability" assessments to a "composite endpoint on acceptability" was recently developed. Before this method's suitability for selection of the most acceptable drug formulation of a new medicine for children can be broadly recommended, the acceptance and relevance of such established acceptability needs the critical review and input from young patients with understanding of the medicines development methodology. The benefit of involving patients in drug product development, clinical research and innovation is well established. METHODS: During a focus group meeting with the KIDS Barcelona (young people advisory group, age 16-23 years) the suitability of the "composite endpoint on acceptability" methodology was assessed. Via electronic questionnaires the importance of involving patients in the medicines development and in the acceptability method development was investigated. Questions on how best to determine palatability and swallowability were asked. The relevance of all EMA-listed acceptability elements was assessed via coloured and numbered stickers and questionnaires. RESULTS: The results showed that the involvement of young people in the medicines and acceptability method development was rated high. The group worked out that a 5-point smiley Likert Scale is preferred for assessing acceptability by 6-11 year old patients, while a Visual Analogue Scale is preferred for collecting adolescents' opinion. The ranking of the EMA-listed acceptability elements showed that palatability and swallowability are the most relevant parameters, while colour of the medicine was rated as least relevant. These results, established face-to-face, were confirmed in a repeat of the ranking through an electronic questionnaire, completed by the participants individually and remotely, 5 weeks later. CONCLUSION: This work reinforced the need and value to involve young people in the medicines lifecycle, and specifically in this acceptability method development. As next step other focus group meetings with more young people from different European countries are planned.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".