4 ms·

FYI, the drug being tested was for Parkinson's disease (nytimes doesn't say that but lemonde does): http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2016/01/15/essai-thera

• sjg007 11y ago
  Seems weird to do a Phase I trial in healthy volunteers for a monoclonal antibody targeted to Parkinson's.
  • sp332 11y ago
    Phase I is for safety. And it's hard to separate the effects of the drug from other health effects if the patients aren't healthy to begin with.
  • chrisseaton 11y ago
    This is the whole point of a Phase 1 trial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_clinical_research#Phase_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_clinical_research#Ph...
    • sjg007 11y ago
      You don't test Phase 1 anticancer drugs in healthy volunteers. So likewise monoclonal antibodies for Parkinson's should probably be first tested in the affected population. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3678815/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3678815/
      • intrasight 11y ago
        Perhaps they do - if all Phase 1 is done on healthy human guinea pigs. Better question is why do we allow otherwise healthy people to be guinea pigs?
        • Fomite 11y ago
          Because we need to know about drug side effects, and it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to parse out those effects in people who are already very sick. Additionally, those side effects are likely far less dangerous in an otherwise healthy individual.
      • cjbprime 11y ago
        > You don't test Phase 1 anticancer drugs in healthy volunteers. [citation needed]
      • ig1 11y ago
        Only when they're known to be toxic, drugs which are considered otherwise benign (or at least not excessively toxic) which include some newer cancer drugs are tested in healthy volunteers.
• Locke1689 11y ago
  Side question: is it normal in French to stylize the title as "lemonde"? It would be strange in English, to my eyes, to refer to a newspaper whose name was "The World" as theworld.
  • Signez 11y ago
    French here: no, it is not common. It is sometimes referred as "lemonde.fr", but the space is never omitted if we are not citing the web domain (with its TLD).