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Expanded access

Program providing access to unapproved drugs or medical devices

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 22, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

Expanded access or compassionate use is the use of an unapproved drug or medical device under special forms of investigational new drug applications (IND) or IDE application for devices, outside of a clinical trial, by people with serious or life-threatening conditions who do not meet the enrollment criteria for the clinical trial in progress.

Editorial summary

“Expanded access” enters the record as program providing access to unapproved drugs or medical devices. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Expanded, access and Program can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current 54-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Expanded, access and Program.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Expanded access” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Expanded, access and Program provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Expanded access”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Expanded access primary sources, Expanded access archive and Expanded research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Expanded access”?
  2. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
  3. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Expanded access” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.