Designing and conducting psoriasis clinical trials is tricky. After all, psoriasis is a highly variable group of conditions that produce a range of debilitating and often subjective symptoms. So how do researchers assess efficacy in novel psoriasis treatments? Read on for the answer. Considerations for Psoriasis Trials In clinical practice, broad global assessments are used...
When it comes to analgesic drug development, it’s important to optimize design of early phase trials. The main objectives of studies at this stage are to: Explore a range of doses Obtain data on onset, peak effect, and duration Assess relative efficacy in comparison to established analgesics To accurately evaluate their product, sponsors need to...
Patient registry and natural history studies are often thought of as interchangeable, but there are major differences in these approaches to clinical drug development. Understanding the role of each is important, as well as understanding the distinctions on how these study designs are used in pursuing treatments for rare diseases. Patient Registries A patient registry...
In general, greater certainty about the clinical benefit of a drug correlates with an increased time to achieve needed results — the best evidence can take years of careful follow-up. But an unnecessarily long time to market isn’t good for sponsors and patients alike. This is especially true for patients battling rare cancers: With many of these conditions lacking standard treatments,...
While adaptive design is associated with many potential benefits, it may also present challenges to observing the basic ethical principles of research in human subjects. In this white paper, we review the features of particular clinical trial design adaptations and discuss the ethical obstacles they can present and those they can potentially resolve. The value...
Traditional trials apply a frequentist strategy, which rely on the accuracy of pre-defined design assumptions (or inputs) to construct an effective design that yields robust final trial results. From first-patient-in to last- patient-out, trial execution proceeds without change, following a black box approach. While this strategy is common in clinical research, it is not well suited to...
Rare diseases present some unique obstacles for researchers that significantly contribute to the high cost of drug development. Fortunately, innovations in biomarker use have the potential to significantly cut back on these costs while improving data quality. However, before biomarkers can be used in this research, their associated collection, measurement, and evaluation methods must be validated. The key phases of biomarker...
Children aren’t little adults: Pediatric populations have needs and physiological factors that set them apart from adults. However, it’s taken time for that philosophy to catch on within the clinical research community at large. When writing protocols for trials of acute pain in pediatric populations, researchers must take these unique needs of children into account to meet regulatory...
Medical device and diagnostic companies face greater demand to provide clinical evidence of product efficacy than ever before. With increased scrutiny from regulators, healthcare systems, and even patients, more device companies are performing clinical trials to improve the likelihood of commercial success. In today’s competitive landscape, device companies are facing increased demand for clinical evidence...
As our understanding of the genetic and molecular basis of cancer advances, rare oncology research is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. In fact, in 2014, more than 40 percent of U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s orphan drug designations were for rare cancers. Moreover, the trend toward increasing international cooperation among big pharma, biotech, and academia...