Vanderbilt’s dedicated institutional review board for social, behavioral and educational research has reached a major milestone.
A year after its soft launch, the VU SBER IRB is fully operational and strengthens Vanderbilt’s support for human-participant research while improving through feedback from the research community.
The IRB reached its third and final transition phase in January—starting to move eligible social, behavioral and educational research studies, which account for more than 90 percent of Vanderbilt’s human-participant research, from the Vanderbilt University Medical Center IRB to the university’s review process.
Collaboration with faculty and research staff is helping the Human Research Protections Program refine processes and build a more responsive and efficient review system for the IRB that supports Vanderbilt’s discovery and innovation mission.
“Launching the new IRB has required significant collaboration among staff, faculty and our partners at VUMC,” said Elizabeth Zechmeister, senior associate provost for research and development and interim chief research officer. “This first year has been about building a strong foundation that can support Vanderbilt’s research enterprise. We are grateful for ongoing feedback from our research community as we build and refine processes that serve both investigators and research participants.”
Since the soft launch, the VU Human Research Protections Program has made quick progress. Program successes:
- The new VU SBER IRB has processed 405 studies.
- Seventeen researchers from across Vanderbilt serve on the SBER IRB committee; their wide-ranging expertise ensures rigorous and thoughtful review.
- More than 400 researchers have used the HRPP Determination Tool to establish whether their studies require IRB review, and by the new VU SBER IRB or by VUMC’s.
- Support of international studies and community-engaged research partnerships, an important goal of the new program.
Ongoing improvements:
- Working to streamline the pre-review stage of protocol submissions to reduce turnaround times and minimize clarification requests.
- With guidance from a faculty working group, redesigned two protocol templates to help investigators provide required information clearly, thus reducing follow-up questions during pre-review.
- Expanded HRPP staffing to support researchers; a third HRPP analyst joined the team this semester.
Researchers should use the new protocol templates for all new study submissions. Investigators submitting modifications to existing studies may use the current templates.
The HRPP team offers office hours each week to answer IRB and HRPP-related questions. Guidance, training opportunities and updated resources for researchers are on the Vanderbilt Human Subjects Research website. Researchers can email the HRPP team at irb@vanderbilt.edu with questions.
