Clinical trials explained

Clinical studies are designed to answer specific scientific questions

Clinical trials are essential to providing the scientific data to determine whether new drugs, diagnostics or procedures are both safe and effective when used to diagnose and treat people. Roche video, published on 28 May 2014, part of  Drawn to Science series.

More info and videos
  • Carefully conducted clinical trials are performed in human volunteers to provide answers to important questions. Every new treatment is usually tested in three phases of clinical trials before regulatory agencies consider it safe and effective. Depending on product type and development stage, investigators initially enroll volunteers and/or patients into small pilot studies and subsequently conduct progressively larger scale comparative studies. As positive safety and efficacy data are gathered, the number of patients typically increases. Clinical trials can vary in size, and can involve a single research entity in one country or multiple entities in multiple countries.
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