Real world data

On 17 September 2015, the Academy of Medical Sciences, in partnership with the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, held a joint workshop on ‘Real world evidence’. This forms part of the Academy’s FORUM programme, which brings together leaders from across the life sciences to accelerate progress through discussion, collaboration and innovation.

The workshop, chaired by Sir Alasdair Breckenridge CBE FRSE FMedSci, comprised participants from across industry, regulatory, academia and policy, and aimed to explore:

• How real world evidence might contribute to regulatory and HTA decision-making

• Aspirations and opportunities for future use of real world evidence in a regulatory context

• The acceptability of real world evidence, challenges to acceptability and steps to overcome these

Over the course of the morning session, speakers from the MHRA, EMA, FDA, NICE, ABPI and IMI GetReal initiative presented their perspectives on real world evidence and the work that each of their organisations is engaged with in this area. The presentations can be downloaded from the righthand side of this page. During the break-out sessions, participants then discussed their aspirations for the use of real world evidence by 2020, barriers to these aspirations and practical steps to overcome these barriers.

A full meeting report is available to download from the right hand side of this page.

The Academy's FORUM hosted a scoping roundtable on 24 January 2018 to examine the progress in the use of real world data and evidence since the 2015 workshop.

The roundtable brought together senior representatives from across academia, industry, the NHS, regulatory agencies and funders to examine the environment for the use of real world evidence (RWE) in health technology development, assessment and evaluation. This roundtable forms part of the follow-up work to the 2015 workshop on real world evidence, which focused on regulatory acceptability of RWE, and examined how the landscape has changed since then.

The roundtable was chaired by Sir Alasdair Breckenridge CBE FRSE FMedSci, Former Chair of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and Professor Andrew Morris CBE FRSE FMedSci, Director of Health Data Research UK and Professor of Diabetic Medicine, University of Edinburgh, and took place on 24 January 2018 at the Academy’s offices at 41 Portland Place, London, W1B 1QH. 

This meeting was by invitation only and the summary meeting report has now been published and can be found on the right hand side of this page. For further details please contact forum@acmedsci.ac.uk.