Training school

COMFA Training School

25 September - 27 September 2021

The COMFA Training school is free of charge for

• Registered participants, who are COMFA members
• Registered participants, who are students and are able to provide some proof of their student status from university etc.

All members of the COMFA/CS COUSIN community are invited to participate in this event. To register, please click here

This training school aims to provide basic skills for Core Outcome Set (COS) development containing keynote lectures and joint discussions on

• Managing a COS development project
• Literature research
• Qualitative research
• Systematic Reviews
• COS development

 Core Outcome Sets (COS) ensure that trial outcomes are relevant to patients, clinicians, healthcare providers and regulators; and they allow trial outcomes to be combined in meta-analysis, so that new findings are capitalized on as soon as possible. The lack of agreed COS impedes the ability to reliably evaluate new product development, and in turn, adversely affects citizens with food allergy, their caretakers, the European clinical trial industry as well as European manufacturers of food allergy therapeutics and their regulators. An established COS will allow trialists to design their trial outcomes with confidence, reduce the risks for industry in new product development, support regulators in assessing and authorising products, and allow citizens affected by food allergy to understand the relative benefits or harms of different treatment options.

The value of core outcome standardisation in clinical trials is now widely accepted worldwide, with the Core Outcome Measures in Effectiveness Trials (COMET) Initiative bringing together highly successful collaborations, such as Outcome Measures in Rheumatoid Arthritis Clinical Trials (OMERACT) and Harmonising Outcome Measures for Eczema (HOME). In 2019, we created an open, interdisciplinary network, including clinicians, health professionals, patient representatives, researchers, methodologists, and psychologists focused on identifying core outcomes for food allergy. The Core Outcome Measures for Food Allergy (COMFA) consortium aims to ensure that domains and instruments measured in trials are valid, relevant, and important to all stakeholders, particularly patients of all gender, ages, and socioeconomic status, and reduce bias by minimising inappropriate outcome selection and/or reporting. This will enable data synthesis from multiple trials and generate the best possible evidence regarding food allergy treatments.

The COMFA consortium’s strength is that it incorporates European, North American, South African, Australasian, and Japanese expertise across a wide range of fields, providing a comprehensive framework for development and analysis of COS. COMFA brings together experts with different backgrounds and from many countries representing geographical diversity as well as cultural and environmental differences. Through leveraging this extensive experience, we aim to develop and enhance a COS that will advance clinical care and clinical trial development for food allergy therapeutics, across a diverse scope of cultural backgrounds.

When treatments are tested, researchers look at the effect on patients by measuring an "outcome". At the moment, different studies often measure different outcomes which makes it difficult to compare and combine results. You can watch a short video explaining what core outcomes are, why they are important and how patients and health professionals are involved in developing them here.