Future Clinical Trial Recruitment

Application for this Invention

A method of recruiting clinical trial candidates using an online community is disclosed that includes creating an illness-specific online community. Membership accounts are created for members joining the online community. Personal and medical information is collected from the members and categorized and stored in a member database. Information on a clinical trial is collected from a client. The member database is searched to determine candidates for the clinical trial.

Related ArticleIn 2004,

U.S. pharmaceutical companies invested $39 billion on research & development. Of that investment, $18 billion was spent on clinical development, 16% of which, or just under $3 billion, was spent on the recruitment of suitable patients for U.S. States, 80% of which are delayed significantly due to unfulfilled enrollment. Patient recruitment accounts for 30% of time spent on clinical trials. Due to the challenge of finding suitable participants, 94% of clinical trials miss their enrollment deadlines in the U.S. Today's methods of recruiting participants have changed little in the past 20 years, and only 4%-6% of eligible patients who suffer from severe and life-threatening illnesses take part in U.S. clinical trials.

Tragic Truth by ALS Grumpy

These statistics are deplorable. It is hard to accept that the pharmas cannot devise a more fruitful enrollment process if they wanted to. Methinks they spend so much on advertising important developments like drugs for E.D., hair loss, leaky valves and other high return drugs, that they spend a pathetic amount of time and resources on improving enrollment procedures.I have found as a member of a terminal illness group that the enrollment criteria are so stringent and require relatively healthy patients, that those of us who are really sick fail to meet the criteria. So the biggest part of a specific illness group are written off right from the get go.

It seems to me using human models to screen drugs would be far for productive that using animal models, which in the case of ALS have proven unreliable after years of relying on them for the bulk of trials. I would rather offer up my remaining days for some trial than watching trial after trial eliminating me from the start. I suppose that is what makes me so grumpy. Well, it is one of the things, other things are the lack of available health care for such a large segment of our population.