Eli5: how do drug trials work for risky medicine so that it doesn’t kill those participating?
In: Biology
I am no expert on this but my stepdad has run a lot of clinical trials and told me about them. The level of risk they’re willing to take with a drug also depends on the mortality of the thing they’re trying to treat. So if you’re trying to treat a really deadly cancer with few other known treatment options, they’ll tolerate a more risky drug trial, but if it’s a vaccine that you’re giving to large numbers of otherwise healthy people, it has to be really really *really* safe.
Drug testing happens in phases. If it is a treatment that still has a high mortality rate, then it won’t move to the human trials phase. Government oversight limits the risk that researchers can take with human life, so a drug with a high risk of death won’t be administered to human test subjects. That phase of research is usually left to rats/rabbits
Saw something concerning on the news today. I would like an explanation on how the use of a placebo as a control during human trails is not completely inhumane. Essentially these equally sick people are unknowingly getting fake medicine. Granted they would have to know they were participating in a trail and know there is a chance they would be given a placebo, but still, the administering doctor is breaking the hippocratic oath – do no harm, by purposely not giving therapeutics to a sick patient.
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