The portal for human research in Switzerland

kofam.ch is the Federal Office of Public Health’s (FOPH) portal for human research in Switzerland. On this website you’ll find extensive basic information on the regulation of human research in Switzerland as well as various tools for researchers.

News

Dec 19, 2022

Categoriser now also applicable for IVD research projects

Our assistant for classifying and categorising your research projects, the Categoriser, is now up to date. It can be used again for research projects with in vitro diagnostics (IVD) in accordance with the revision of the Ordinance on Clinical Trials with Medical Devices (ClinO-MD) of 26 May 2022. For more information, see the infographic and case studies on our website

Nov 18, 2022

Reports on the activities of the ethics committees and human research 2021

The statistical report "Human Research in Switzerland 2021" and the summary report "Activities of the Research Ethics Committees 2021" are now available in the "Downloads" section of our website.

These reports describe biomedical research in Switzerland governed by the Human Research Act for the year 2021. The information comes from BASEC, which is managed by the umbrella organization of research ethics committees (swissethics), and from the individual activity reports of the cantonal research ethics committees (EKOS, EKNZ, KEK-BE, KEK-ZH, CCER, CER-VD and CE-TI).

Human research

Key points in a nutshell

A brief summary of the key points on human research in Switzerland

Applications & procedure

Requirement to obtain authorisation, categorisation and submission of applications

All information on the requirement to obtain authorisation, categorisation and submission of applications is available here:

SNCTP Portal

Search for studies

Search for registered clinical trials in Switzerland.

Categoriser

Online wizard for categorising human research projects

The categoriser provides help in assigning and categorising your research project according to the provisions of the Human Research Act – good preparation for the submission of your application!

Case studies

A selection of real human research projects

The case study module provides a selection of real human research projects, each with a brief summary. The projects can be filtered according to various criteria.