The Silliest Thing We Can Imagine

Elon Musk decided to test his revolutionary Falcon Heavy rocket with the “silliest thing we can imagine”. Usually test payloads for new rockets are made of boring hunks of steel and concrete, but if Elon’s past actions are any indication –see his Boring Company branded flamethrower— normal just wouldn’t do. So Musk tweeted out this…

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Fear, Indecision, And The Memo To File

“Just write a memo to file.” How many times have you seen or heard this phrase? Perhaps it came in an email, echoed out of the conference room phone, or maybe you’ve even said it yourself? A memo to file (MTF) is a document filed in the trial master file (TMF) that is intended to…

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The Spirit of the Olympics in your TMF

The PyeongChang Olympics have begun with a flurry of inspiring headlines: Shaun White takes the gold medal and regains his crown’ Russian athletes allowed to compete despite doping controversy’ Unified Korean women’s hockey team takes the ice under united one flag’ These headlines give us hope that the Olympic Games reflects the best of humanity.…

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Romance in the TMF

I bet you are familiar with those cliché candy hearts, but did know those little hearts share some history with the pharmaceutical industry? Conversation hearts were first invented in 1847, when Boston pharmacist Oliver Chase decided he wanted to make his fortune in the apothecary lozenge fad of the mid-1800s.  While Chase was working as…

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Embracing the Risk-Based TMF

Introduction The release of the 2017 ICH GCP E6(R2) guidelines marks a paradigm shift in clinical research. Risk is mentioned no fewer than 30 times in the guidance. ICH GCP E6(R2) section 5.1 requires that the sponsor of a trial, “implements and maintains systems for quality assurance and quality and control.” 1 The EMA recognizes, that although…

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TMF Summit 2018 – Top Three Trends

It was a pleasure attending this year’s TMF Summit for many reasons. Here are the top three trends in TMF that I noticed throughout the presentations: Focus on the TMF (Trial Master File) varies greatly by company. I was surprised to see that even some of the bigger companies in attendance have only made the…

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