Patient and parent engagement is crucial for successful pediatric drug trials. That’s why the best strategies are ones that encourage proactive involvement beginning at the early stages of protocol development through study conduct and eventual results-sharing. And that includes input. We partnered with iCAN in 2015 to ask pediatric patients, their family members, and even their friends...
Bringing a novel drug to market can be a long, perilous journey down the clinical testing pipeline, taking upwards of 10 to 15 years. Maintaining research and development productivity while navigating the ever-changing regulatory landscape, the choppy waters of today’s reimbursement environments, and the rising tide of clinical trial costs is increasingly challenging. Medicines that fail...
Placebo response is an ever-present threat in analgesia clinical trials, and failure to sufficiently prove the efficacy of the researched compound can easily doom your promising new product. The risk can be especially pronounced when studying drugs to treat fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia patients can be — and don’t use the term casually or critically — needy....
Vaccines were once thought to have great potential for combating some types of cancer, but reality has failed to match those expectations. To date, vaccines have failed to play a major role in the pursuit of immune response for oncology patients. There have been two notable successes — sipuleucel-T (marketed as Provenge) is approved to...
Wearable medical devices are yielding increasingly important insights into health. Rosalind Picard, Sc.D., professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, discussed the applications of one such device, wearable wrist sensors that measure electrical changes in the skin, in an informative plenary lecture we attended at the American Pain Society’s 36th annual meeting in Pittsburgh,...
In evaluating patient response to treatment of solid tumors, the nearly decade-old RECIST 1.1 guideline remains the gold standard. But the implementation earlier this year of the iRECIST guidance is focusing attention on how the many wide-ranging approaches to tumor assessment interrelate, and how they rank in relevance — today and looking forward. It all...
The most prevalent gauge of efficacy in the study of fibromyalgia drugs is — no surprise here — pain relief. But analgesic effect alone is not a sufficient measure in the eyes of the FDA, which seeks evidence of overall benefit and improvement in patient function when evaluating treatments for a condition commonly associated with...
Scott Millard of Premier Research reviews how to best operationalize fibromyalgia clinical trials in a 2017 APS Town Hall Talk in Pittsburgh, PA.
Dr. Thomas Laage, Director, Product Development Consulting and Regulatory Medical Writing Support shares more about his participation in MIT’s Hacking Medicine Grand Hack Weekend. As I mentioned in my last post, I was excited to participate in MIT’s Hacking Medicine Grand Hack. I paired up with two other attendees to develop and pitch our idea to the...
Dr. Thomas Laage, Director, Product Development Consulting and Regulatory Medical Writing Support tells us about his experience with MIT’s Hacking Medicine Grand Hack Weekend. It started with an email from Dan Morden, a young biotech entrepreneur in Cambridge whom I had met during a business call several months ago. “MIT’s Hacking Medicine is holding a...