FDA Oncology Center of Excellence Crowdsourcing Initiative: Outreach to the Scientific Community to Identify Research Questions for Pooled Analyses of Oncology Clinical Trial Data.

The FDA Oncology Center of Excellence recently launched a crowdsourcing pilot to request ideas from the scientific community for research questions that FDA could address with pooled analyses of clinical trial data submitted to the agency for regulatory purposes. This effort builds on FDA's track record of publishing pooled analyses to explore scientific questions that cannot be addressed in a single trial due to limited sample size. The research crowdsourcing pilot tested a new approach for obtaining external input on regulatory science activities, because FDA is generally unable to share patient-level data outside of the agency due to federal disclosure laws and regulations protecting different types of data submitted in regulatory applications. We received 29 submissions over the 28-day crowdsourcing campaign, including one research idea that we are exploring for possible follow-up. Based on our experience with this pilot, we learned that crowdsourcing is a promising new approach to gather external input and feedback. We identified opportunities to build understanding in the external oncology community about the types of data typically included in regulatory applications and expand the dissemination of published FDA pooled analyses to help inform future drug development and clinical practice.

The re-appearing shadow of 1918: trends in the historiography of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic.

This article traces the ways in which the subject of the "Spanish" Influenza pandemic of 1918-19, the worst short-term pandemic of modern times, has been treated (or ignored) by historians over the last 86 years. In doing so , it identifies four distinct surges of interest in the topic, each producing a different conception of this pandemic as history: as epidemiology, as high drama, as social science and ecology, and as scientific saga. It seeks to explain these differing conceptions as part of a wider phenomenon, viz., how an event can be neglected, discovered, made, and re-made as history.