Seeking a clinical trial?
One of the best resources on the internet to find a clinical trial for any disease is clinicaltrials.gov. This resource website is a government website and does not accept advertising or sponsorships.
There is a wealth of information on the website which is easily accessed through a robust search function which is very user friendly.
History Of Clinicaltrials.gov
The National Library of Medicine maintains clinicaltrials.gov at the National Institutes of Health. The website came online in 2000 as a collaborative effort between the NIH and the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) due to the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act of 1997.
The clinical trials are privately and federally funded studies; not all clinical trials are required to be registered by law; however the website continues to grow with required participation, voluntary participation. Trials are registered from the United States and 190 countries throughout the world.
How Does Clinicaltrials.gov Work?
The information on the website is registered, maintained and updated by the sponsor or the principal investigator of the trial. The information on the website is very detailed and the website has a robust search function to enable easy search of the trials by every imaginable parameter.
For example a quick general search for Parkinson’s disease reveals 1549 trials. Drilling down the information further reveals and Alzheimer’s disease reveals 390 trials are currently recruiting over nine regions in the world.
A quick general search for Alzheimer’s disease shows 1637 trials. Drilling down the database further shows 412 studies are currently recruiting over 11 regions of the world.
The studies by topic search page offers conditions grouped alphabetically along with the number of studies currently in the database.
What Is A Clinical Trial?
Clinical trials are research studies which seek to discover if a medical treatment, strategy or device is safe for humans. Scientific standards are set and followed to ensure the safety of the participants of the trials. Trials begin in the lab and may progress to human testing if the results appear promising.
A diverse group of participants are sought as research has found that outcomes of the study can differ by gender, age, ethnicity. This offers researchers valuable information for the study as a prospective treatment progresses its’ way through the clinical trial hierarchy. Clinical trials for drugs generally have four phases; however depending upon the trial and its’ results, not all drugs progress through all four phases.
Clinical Trials And The Stock Market
Investors and stock analysts are avid watchers of the results of clinical trials as the outcome of a drug clinical trial, particularly in the later phases, can affect the price of the stock of the manufacturer. It is a lengthy road for a new drug to travel through a clinical trial and the stock price of the company who manufactures a prospective new drug frequently fluctuates on the outcome of each phase of a trial.
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