Christy Frey learned what an IRB was at 16, sitting in on board meetings at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital during free blocks in high school. By 18, that volunteer regulatory experience had already landed her a full-time IRB role. Nearly two decades later, she runs IRB meeting operations and consent form development at Advarra, which holds an estimated 22 to 25 percent of the independent IRB segment in a global market valued at roughly $1.80 billion in 2025. What she describes about daily operations at that scale is less about institutional pride and more about a specific workflow problem: IRB boards spend too much time on administrative noise that could be resolved before a submission ever reaches them.
Frey’s team works to catch and resolve issues during pre-review, so the board’s attention stays on the actual ethical judgment call. She gets on calls with sites, sponsors, and institutions directly when email conversations stall, treating resolution speed as a patient access issue, not a customer service metric. The reasoning is straightforward: a researcher waiting two to four weeks for expedited IRB approval, or four to six weeks for full board review per 2024 industry benchmarks, loses time that a patient waiting for trial access does not get back.
On technology, Frey draws a clear line between where the platform has already changed the work and where it is going next. Centralized electronic review replaced paper-based processes she remembers managing early in her career, allowing boards to review materials faster and collaboratively rather than sequentially. The next priorities she names are better client analytics and AI applied to manual pre-review processes, a direction consistent with Advarra’s March 2026 launch of AI-powered GxP compliance tools aimed at reducing inspection preparation burden for sponsors and sites. Whether that same AI capability extends into IRB workflow in a meaningful way is the operational question worth watching.
Frey’s framing throughout is consistent: ethics sets the floor, and everything built around it is fair game for acceleration. The test of that principle will be whether the analytics improvements she flags actually reduce pre-board cycle time at sites that currently absorb most of the waiting.
Source link: https://www.advarra.com/blog/qa-with-advarras-senior-director-of-irb-services-christy-frey/
Moe Alsumidaie, MBA, MSF, is founder and Chief Editor of Vanguard Publications, which publishes Clinical Trial Vanguard, Pharma Vanguard and BullScope, and Head of Research at CliniBiz. He has two decades in clinical trial operations and data science, with earlier roles at Genentech, Abbott Vascular and Stanford University Medical Center, and is a guest lecturer in clinical trial sciences at Rutgers University.
