Patients
What Are Clinical Trials?
Help Find a Cure for Your Health Problems
A New Solution for You
And a Cure for All Others
Clinical trials (clinical studies or clinical research) are meant to assess if an investigation medicine is safe and effective or not in regard to treating a particular disease or group of patients.
During these studies, investigators gather information about the effects of the investigation medicine on the participants involved in the clinical trials. After a clinical study ends, the appropriate regulatory authorities carefully analyze the data and decide if the investigated medicine should be studied some more in order to make this new treatment option available to other patients as well.
Strict Rules & Regulations
For Your Safety
There are strict rules and regulations that have to be followed during clinical trials, in order to protect the rights of the participants.
These rules and regulations ensure that the studies comply to all necessary ethical and medical standards.
How Clinical Trials Work
Once a substance or medical device shows promising results after an extensive pre-clinical process (lab tests, animal testing, etc.) the new potential treatment goes through 4 stages:
1. The medicine/medical device is used on a small number of patients or healthy subjects (20-100) in order to assess safety and potential side effects, but also the best way of using it.
2. A couple of hundreds of patients who suffer from the health issue that the study focuses on will be involved (for up to 2 years) in order to assess the efficacy and safety of the medicine/medical device.
3. An even greater number of people (between 300 and 3000) participate in assessing the safety and efficiency, by comparison with a standard treatment or a placebo. This stage can last between 1 and 4 years.
4. Even after the investigation medicine/medical device is authorized for mass use, the testing continues in order to monitor risks, benefits, and usage.
Modern medicine and all the pills, procedures, and medical devices that we take for granted in our daily lives would not have been possible if not for clinical research. Even the most basic medicine you take today for a headache was once the object of a clinical trial. This is how medical progress happens and the ones who make it happen are researchers, doctors and patients!