Released March 31, the new P21 Enterprise 4.0 provides more options for submitting study data to the Japanese health authority PMDA, plus better ways to manage validation issues and reports, as well as new validation rules and support for STDMIG 3.3.

P21 Enterprise 4.0 addresses concerns raised by our customers who submit data to both FDA and PMDA. Historically, regulators at the two agencies have embraced clinical data standards and conformance rules at different rates and degrees of severity.

Running data validations for PMDA has required a separate compliance strategy, plus extra time for validation and regulatory submission. Too often, sponsors worry that PMDA submission packages will fall short of reviewer expectations.

On November 24th, the Japanese Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency (PMDA) published its first official list of validation rules for CDISC SDTM, ADaM and Define.xml. These long awaited rules cover conformance, reviewability and quality requirements, as described in the PMDA Technical Conformance Guide on Electronic Study Data Submissions. The rules will ensure that data conform to the standards and support ease of use and meaningful analysis.

The PMDA agency is asking sponsors to validate their study data before submission — using these published validation rules — and either correct any validation issues or explain why they could not be corrected in the data guide. PMDA has introduced new “Reject” rules, which, if violated, will cause the review to be suspended until issues are corrected. PMDA can also suspend review if explanations for certain issues are not provided.