News: AAAS News & Notes 24 June 2011 Edited by Edward W.
Lempinen To Improve Health Care, Experts Look to Cure Clinical
Trials Clinical trials are the systematic way that modern
medicine determines whether new treatments are safe and
effective. But while the process is critically important to
improved health care, the number of new drugs submitted to the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration in recent years is only about
half what it was in the 1990s. To experts at a conference
cosponsored by AAAS, this is symptomatic of a system ill suited
for 21st-century medicine. Today’s clinical trials, in an effort
to measure the often subtle effect of new therapies, tend to be
huge and unwieldy. Now the search is under way for more
streamlined, cost-effective, and sensitive ways to assemble
patients and collect data. “Our clinical trials system is
falling behind the needs of society, and we have to figure out a
way to do it more efficiently and better,” said Duke
University’s Robert M. Califf, a leading U.S. expert on the