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posted by martyb on Saturday May 02 2020, @09:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the festina-lente dept.

With a major pandemic sweeping the world, the standard process of clinical trials for drug approval has come under criticism as a needless source of bureaucracy and delay. Drug discovery chemist Derek Lowe in a blog post explains how clinical trials for drug approval work and the reasons behind the various requirements that the FDA and equivalent organisations around the world generally put in place before approving a new drug. He explains how most of these apparently pointless bureaucratic hurdles are actually there to help protect the integrity of the scientific process and ensure that the human subjects undergoing the trials are treated ethically. While a case can be made for relaxing some of these safeguards, especially in this time of pandemic, it is probably not a good idea to do so without at least understanding what these safeguards are for.

Determining how much of a pharmaceutical is needed to prepare for the trial. Ensuring your are actually preparing just that drug and not a polymorph. Proper laboratory and manufacturing practices to ensure the desired drug is actually prepared without impurities and contaminants. Preparing a plan for a drug trial. Demographics — age, gender, weight, current medications being taken. Getting a representative distribution of these as participants. And there's much more.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 03 2020, @03:46AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday May 03 2020, @03:46AM (#989692)

    Barriers are good, and the scientific barriers should be higher than they are (or, alternately, an increased level of transparency on the already established scientific standards). What's not so good is that some of the barriers are costlier than they have to be to get the good science. Want to setup a new animal research lab? The requirements are beyond gratuitous, they're basically saying: "if you don't already have one, you're not going to get one."

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