Researchers are turning to smaller, more narrowly targeted clinical trials to test the next generation of medicines, The Wall Street Journal reports. Experts are divided over the shift: smaller trials make sense for more personalized treatments, but incremental benefits often are only discovered with a lot of data.
By the numbers: The number of clinical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health fell by 41% from 2005 to 2015, according to the WSJ, largely because trials have gotten more expensive.
What they’re saying:
- New therapies “are trying to match drugs to individual patients’ features, so the sorts of trials we need will look much different than the large clinical trials,” Nicholas Schork, a professor at the Translational Genomics Research Institute, told the Journal.
- “I think that we are throwing away a lot of good drugs and a lot of good diagnostics because our trials are too small,” sad Larry Norton, a breast-cancer specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering.