Federal officials have dropped a controversial plan to impose new rules that researchers say would have made it much harder to use patient blood and tissue samples in research. The final Common Rule released this morning omits these provisions, but leaves some other changes intact.

Biomedical and university research groups that lobbied against the biospecimens provisions are relieved. “We are very pleased at the amount of time, attention, and effort that went into reviewing the comments. The process worked,” says Lizbet Boroughs, who follows biomedical research policy for the Association of American Universities in Washington, D.C.

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Bioethicist Hank Greely of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who also supported the biospecimens consent requirement, believes the decision to drop the proposal from the final rule is “a predictable result of the disparity in lobbying power” between research institutions and patients. (Some patient groups had supported the change.)