Outcomes, Expensive Outcomes

Well, to go along with that recent paper on confounding cell assays, here's a column by John LaMattina on the problem of confounding clinical results. For some years now, the regulatory and development trend has been away from surrogate markers and towards outcome studies. You'd think that lowering LDL would be helpful - is it? You'd think that combining two different mechanisms to lower blood pressure would be a good thing - is it? The only way to answer the questions is by looking at a large number of patients in as close to a real-world setting as possible. And in many cases, we're finding out that some very reasonable-sounding ideas don't, in fact, work out in practice. These aren't just findings with new or experimental drugs, either - as LaMattina shows, we're finding out things about drugs that have been on the market for years. This illustrates several important points: (1) There's a limit to what you can find out in clinical trials. (2) There is a limit to what reasonable medical hypotheses are worth. (3) We do not understand as much as we need to about human biology, in either the healthy or diseased state. (4) A drug, even when it's been approved, even when it's been on the market for years, is always an experimental medication. LaMattina also points out just how crazily expensive the outcomes trials are that can generate the data that we really need. He's hoping that companies that spend that sort of money will emerge with a compelling enough case to be able to...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Clinical Trials Source Type: blogs