What Low-Cost Initiatives Could Help Improve Clinical Trials?

ALL ASPECTS OF CLINICAL TRIALS REQUIRE MAJOR CHANGE: design, recruitment, execution, and reporting of the results. Deficiencies in all of these contribute to the disastrous state of clinical research. Improving the design of clinical studies is a relatively low-cost initiative that would increase the quality of clinical research and make biopharma R&D more productive. Three areas to be addressed:

1. Publishing detailed results of all trials will result in fewer “nonstarter” trials that chase a target or patient population already adequately tested.
2. Leverage advances in computer sciences to analyze existing data from all available sources, and implement in silico models.
3. Give a major voice in “shaping up” clinical protocols to end users: patients and physicians.

All of the above have been talked and written about. There is general agreement of their potential, but there are precious few efforts to implement these changes.

TOMASZ SABLINSKI, M.D., PH.D.
Tomasz is cofounder and CEO of Transparency Life Sciences.