Clinical studies/trials medication costs

However, pervasive computing will ultimately do much more it will change the very way in which new drugs are tested. At present, all drugs go through three clinical phases, but the process is both very costly and very inefficient. Clinical trials cannot detect rare side effects and drug interactions, or sometimes even fairly common reactions. In fact, one recent study conducted by Harvard Medical School and Public Citizen, the US consumer advocacy... 

The sponsor bears ultimate responsibility for the success, failure, and safety of the treatment under study, even after FDA approval. In addition, the sponsor is the true innovator in the clinical trial process. Innovation is expensive, causing newly available treatments to be costly to the end user. Thus, because of e escalating price of medications, the innovators are under increased scrutiny by consumers and polic5mrakers. Paradoxically, as the population ages, the consumers are driving the demand for new cures and better treatments. 

Two recent trials report that treatment of patients earlier in the course of MS— after a first acute clinical demyelinating event—is of value [9,10]. The results of these studies suggest that interferon-P-la may delay the development of a second bout of demyelination. These reports may influence decisions regarding the timing of interferon therapy, but the inconvenience of medication requiring injection, treatment-related side effects, cost, and the lack of evidence of an important long-term benefit of interferon-P will deter many specialists from starting treatment earlier in the course of the disease. 

Typically, between 20 and 80 healthy adults (this number can certainly be lower) participate in these relatively short studies, and subjects are often recruited from university medical school settings where trials are being conducted. Subjects are typically paid for their participation. (This payment may be one reason why the term volunteers originated to describe these subjects—see the discussion in Section 1.8.2. However, there are financial benefits to many clinical trial participants in later clinical trials too, in that medical procedures involved in trials are conducted at no cost to the subjects.)... 

Among a highly diverse collection of study conduct service providers—from academic medical centers to dedicated and part-time independent investigative sites— SMOs appear well positioned to meet growing demands for faster development cycle time, improved data quality, and controlled clinical trial costs. Conceptually, SMOs vie to support their positioning through the following mechanisms ... 

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