Insights into Early Interactions on Innovative Developments with European Regulators.

Introduction: The European Medicines Agency Innovation Task Force (ITF) acts as early point of contact for medicine and technology developers to enable innovation during early drug development stages through ITF briefing meetings.

Aim: To reflect on the current pace of innovation and to assess the potential of ITF stakeholder interactions, a comprehensive analysis of the ITF briefing meetings held between 2021 and 2022 was conducted with a focus on individual questions raised by the developers and the related feedback provided by the European regulators.

Methods: Questions raised during ITF briefing meetings were extracted and categorised into main and sub-categories, revealing different themes across the whole medicine development process such as manufacturing technologies, pre-clinical developments, and clinically relevant questions.

Results: There was positive feedback from regulators who gave initial guidance in 85% of the answers, provided concrete examples in 20% of the answers and recommended to continue discussions through additional regulatory procedures in 22% of the answers.

Conclusion: This analysis frames the content and the type of topics discussed during ITF briefing meetings. Moreover, it describes the type of regulatory feedback provided to medicine developers and identified potential for improvement of these early interactions. Therefore, this analysis emphasises the role of ITF briefing meetings in fostering innovation in medicine.