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This article discusses one of the most disputable issues in national clinical research practice in healthy volunteers. Regulatory requirements forbid to assess even minor deviations of laboratory parameters from reference intervals as not clinically significant. Authors made analysis of such requirements from positions of foreign and national guidelines of early phase clinical research and with regard to their own experience in the field. As an important part of this work, retrospective analysis of the laboratory test results data of healthy volunteers taken from several clinical trials was conducted. The aim of this analysis was to establish the rate of not clinically significant deviations from reference intervals. The results of the analysis revealed rather high rate of not clinically significant deviations of some laboratory parameters from reference intervals in volunteers with confirmed status “healthy”. Authors noted that developers of clinical trial protocols have no unified approach to generate list of necessary laboratory tests and methods of assessment of the results. Ethical and financial aspects of the problem under discussion are also touched in this article. In conclusion, authors suggest the scale of clinical significance assessment of deviations of basic laboratory parameters from reference intervals as one of the possible options of optimizing current regulatory requirements.

This article discusses important problem of early phase clinical trials – over-volunteering. The overlapping or dual enrollment of healthy volunteers is a potential high risk not only to study subjects, but also to commercial sponsors because it could cause the delay in advancement of promising drug candidates. The problem of over-volunteering is payed special attention by clinical research professionals in foreign countries. Guidelines for early phase clinical trials recommend implementation of different control and prevention measures of multiple enrollment. The most effective instrument to prevent over-volunteering is considered to be a central internet-based registry of healthy volunteers. Such registries operate in various countries and differ in structure, scope of information collected, types of funding and management. The general operating principles of such registries are described on the example of TOPS data base. TOPS is а special system to prevent over-volunteering that is used by UK phase 1 units. In conclusion, authors urge regulatory authorities and pharmaceutical companies to approach this problem closely because over-volunteering is already a burning issue in our country. It is essential to improve relevant regulatory framework and launch central registries of healthy subjects with regard to international experience.