Xconomy: Lessons For Drug Development From The Aveo Buzzsaw
Summary
But Big Pharma companies run so many studies there that for certain diseases like breast or prostate cancer, they have essentially got the first shot to recruit from a small pool of patients.Doctors outside top medical centers often aren’t equipped, or motivated in many cases, to participate in trials because they’re so busy haggling with insurance companies every day.A better way to do things would be to take advantage of our growing capacity for using “big data.” Miller, for one, says he can imagine moving to a world in which the gold standard—prospective, randomized, controlled trials—become obsolete.And if safety problems or wrinkles in a drug’s efficacy profile appear after it hits the market, regulators and physicians would get updates in real-time, enabling them to make adjustments accordingly.Last week, the leaders of UC San Francisco, the FDA, and the National Institutes of Health advanced some similar ideas for improving healthcare under a broad banner of “precision medicine.” Surely, a lot of readers are still thinking this is a trip into fantasy land.