Tea Leaves: Predicting Risk and Benefit in Translation

Every early phase trial begins with a series of predictions: that a new drug will show clinical utility down to road, that risks to study volunteers will be manageable, and perhaps, that patients in trials will benefit. Make a bad prediction here, and people potentially get hurt and resources wasted. So how good a job do we do with these predictions?

Hard to know, but given the high rate of failure in clinical translation, there are grounds for believing that various stakeholders go into early phase trials with an excess of optimism. In the current issue of PLoS Medicine, Alex London and I posit two problems with the way decision-makers make predictions in early phase trials. First, they underattend frequent and systematic flaws in the preclinical evidence base. Secondly, they draw on an overly narrow evidence base (what we call “evidential conservatism”) that obscures an assessment of whether preclinical studies in a given research area are a reliable indicator of agent promise.

As an open access journal, readers are invited to view our article here. The article has garnered a decent amount of press- digestible summaries can also be found at the Scientist and Pittsburgh Gazette. Also check out a commentary commissioned by the journal editors. (photo credit: canopic 2010)

2011 March 21 | Leave a comment | Tags: benefit first in human trials Phase 1 preclinical studies prediction risk

BibTeX

@Manual{stream2011-54,
    title = {Tea Leaves: Predicting Risk and Benefit in Translation},
    journal = {STREAM research},
    author = {Jonathan Kimmelman},
    address = {Montreal, Canada},
    date = 2011,
    month = mar,
    day = 21,
    url = {http://www.translationalethics.com/2011/03/21/tea-leaves-predicting-risk-and-benefit-in-translation/}
}

MLA

Jonathan Kimmelman. "Tea Leaves: Predicting Risk and Benefit in Translation" Web blog post. STREAM research. 21 Mar 2011. Web. 05 Dec 2024. <http://www.translationalethics.com/2011/03/21/tea-leaves-predicting-risk-and-benefit-in-translation/>

APA

Jonathan Kimmelman. (2011, Mar 21). Tea Leaves: Predicting Risk and Benefit in Translation [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.translationalethics.com/2011/03/21/tea-leaves-predicting-risk-and-benefit-in-translation/

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