From: Office of Clinical Research
Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 9:50 AM
Cc: Maleckar, Millie [BSD] - OCR; Daugherty, Christopher [BSD] - MED
Subject: IRBWise announcement

As per the previous communications on January 24th and February 22nd, the IRB Offices will be transitioning to a new electronic submission process on April 2, 2012. In order to prepare for this transition, our current version of IRBWISE will be taken down on Friday, March 16.

The IRB Office will be continuing to process responses on existing amendment, new protocol, and renewal submissions until March 16 in IRBWISE. If you have questions about an existing submission, please contact the IRB administrator assigned to that submission.

During the two week down time from March 16 to April 2, which is necessary to allow the data from IRBWISE to be converted into the AURA product, the AURA team as well as the IRB Office will be offering optional training sessions on the new AURA system. Information on AURA training can be found on the following webpages:

  • AURA:
  • BSD IRB:

Training sessions offered by the AURA team will be held in the BSLC learning center. These are hands on sessions with individual computers for participants. You can register for these sessions through the links above or directly through the UC training website ( using search keyword AURA IRB).

Training sessions offered by the IRB office will be held in the IRB offices in McGiffert Hall. The IRB office sessions are more of an overview as opposed to the in-depth BSLC sessions. These will be visual presentations with question and answer sections and will be limited to 15 persons per session. Please check the schedule on the IRB website and then email Sherry Robison () in the IRB office in order to attend these sessions.

As users begin to submit in the new system, the following differences between IRBWISE and AURA should be noted:

  • Staff/co-investigator changes are a separate amendment process than other amendments. Staff/co-investigator amendments are a one page form.
  • AURA allows only one amendment per protocol at one time. One staff change and one other amendment can be in process, but not two staff changes or two full amendments.
  • Amendment changes are made directly to the smart form in AURA, so the protocol details always reflect the currently approved version of the study.
  • Reporting on data in AURA will be done through Business Objects.
  • AURA is a universal University of Chicago system for all IRBs on campus. New questions have been added to account for this and to aid in standardization of data. While data from existing studies will convert from IRBWISE to AURA, users may need to complete some additional questions in AURA when existing studies are modified.

If you have any questions regarding this implementation, please contact Christopher Daugherty, IRB Chair, at or 2-4139 or Millie Maleckar, Director of the BSD IRB at or 2-1472.

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