I do not mean to purposely mislead you, your comments are well intentioned and would fit well if I could give you more information.

Lets just say this; a couple of months into the trial he found out he was in the placebo arm of the trial. You will just have to trust me on this one.

I am interested on the comments about a CRO. These trials, regardless of who actually manages them, be it a CRO or a drug company still must go through the IRB’s and ethical committees of the hospitals - no? This is what is so disturbing. What will be interesting to find out is what information does the ethics committee get that allows them to allow the trial to go forward in their institution?

Interesting thread…

Your friend seems to have gotten into some diabolical human experimentation that has little or no relevance to the type of cancer research going on in the pharma industry.

(alternate definition of placebo: “a substance having no pharmacological effect but administered as a control in testing experimentally or clinically the efficacy of a biologically active preparation.”)

It’s been a while since I’ve looked at oncology trials and would appreciate an update.

I completely agree with the reluctance to use a placeo-controlled trial for a cancer patient, regardless of Stage.

Placebo controlled trials are not as big an ethical consideration in CNS, and cardiovascular indications where the threat to ones immediate well being isn’t as great as it might be in Viral, Bacterial and Cancer indications. Millions walk around untreated for high BP, depression, pain etc, but their conditions are not likely to progress that much more into an irreversible state from which even the best treatment won’t bring you back as it does when dealing with Viral, Bacterial infections and cancer.

I recall one breast cancer trial that compared agressive lab work as the control vs. tamoxifen for bc risk reduction. That was not an industry trial–It was the Eastern Oncology Group, I believe.

To Matt, if I never work with a CRO again it will be too soon.

I’m very sorry about your friend. I would be willing to bet that the trial was administered by a Contract Research Organization. I can not imagine a research institute/ university Institutional Review Board would approve such a trial.

But, CROs are a different ethical problem.

Nathan, the patient knew he was in the placebo because he was actually getting nothing…..No radiation, no chemo - nothing…Bizarre as it all sounds.

Heart Breaking…

this is how they’ve been doing things already. Nothing new.

How do you know that your friend was on the placebo end of the trial? I thought that patients generally never found out which arm of the trial that they were in. Could it simply be that the drug failed? As I’m sure you know, the efficacy of cancer drugs is notoriously unpredictable. We’ve created miracle drugs for rats that fail to do a thing in humans.