Advarra is giving money to an organization and explicitly telling it not to take direction from Advarra. That structure is the point. The IRB operator and clinical trial technology company has granted funding to PRIM&R, a professional organization founded in 1974 that now serves more than 25,000 individuals across 1,000 institutions in over 30 countries, to build an AI ethics and governance curriculum for the research oversight community. PRIM&R controls the agenda, selects speakers, and holds full editorial authority. Advarra’s name does not appear on the syllabus.
The rationale is more practical than altruistic. IRBs reviewing studies that use AI-assisted tools are already fielding questions with no settled answers: how to describe an algorithm’s role in a consent form, or what safeguards apply when a tool could influence enrollment eligibility decisions. The Advarra post makes the gap explicit: institutions with dedicated technology evaluation staff are working through these questions; institutions without those resources face the same questions and get far less support. Field-wide programming is the only mechanism that reaches both.
The initiative runs across three formats: a podcast miniseries, a leadership roundtable series that culminates at the PRIM&R Annual Conference, and a multi-day virtual workshop. The range matters because IRB professionals at large academic medical centers and those at smaller community institutions rarely share the same professional development budgets or conference calendars. Spreading delivery across formats is how you actually reach the latter group. Meanwhile, the FDA’s own draft guidance on AI supporting regulatory decision-making signals that institutional-level governance questions are arriving faster than most oversight bodies have policy frameworks to handle them.
What makes this arrangement worth watching is the governance model itself. Advarra develops AI tools for clinical research, meaning it has a direct commercial stake in how oversight bodies eventually interpret AI use. Funding an independent curriculum rather than producing one internally removes that conflict from the education IRB professionals receive. Whether other technology vendors adopt the same arm’s-length structure when supporting ethics education will tell you something real about the field’s appetite for that kind of separation.
Source link: https://www.advarra.com/blog/why-we-funded-ai-ethics-education-for-research-oversight-and-left-the-agenda-to-primr/
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.
