Today’s Wall Street Journal includes an interesting article about clinical trials at UCSF that are taking the concept of matching ‘the right drug to the right patient’ to a new level. The I-Spy 2 clinical trial will use the ‘adaptive trial’ approach – rotating multiple experimental therapies through sequential testing in a group of breast cancer patients. The drugs to be tested are from Abbott, Amgen and Pfizer. The goal is to save valuable time, and money, in the search for effective drugs for each individual person. The adaptive clinical trial design will incorporate information from genetic testing, imaging, surgery and biology as decision points on what drugs to use for a particular patient, and when to switch patients between drugs. Briefly, adaptive clinical trials offer the ability for clinicians to make early stage decision points during a trial and to migrate patients off one drug and onto another, if there is no response to the first. The design of adaptive trials is being used more widely in common conditions such as breast cancer to improve trial success rates and offer greater hope to those living with the tumors. Importantly, adaptive trials could also be highly applicable to orphan conditions such as neurofibromatosis where the patient population is small and – as is starting to become a reality and look set to grow – there are multiple drugs in trials testing.
Today’s Wall Street Journal includes an interesting article about clinical trials at UCSF that are taking the concept of matching ‘the right drug to the right patient’ to a new level. The I-Spy 2 cli
