Improving risk/benefit estimates in new drug trials

Improving risk/benefit estimates in new drug trials

From the Science Daily News March 8 2011 news item

ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2011) — It’s all too familiar: researchers announce the discovery of a new drug that eradicates disease in animals. Then, a few years later, the drug bombs in human trials. In the latest issue of the journal PLoS Medicine, ethics experts Jonathan Kimmelman, associate professor at McGill’s Biomedical Ethics Unit and Department of Social Studies of Medicine, and Alex John London, associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, argue that this pattern of boom and bust may be related to the way researchers predict outcomes of their work in early stages of drug development.

 

The study suggests researchers focus too narrowly on pre-clinical data, which leads to overoptimistic predictions. It is also possible that drug bias is not as rigorous in animal testing than in human testing.