2 ms·

What does “washed out” mean? What were their conclusions?

• Ensorceled 8y ago
  When we “washed out” our HIV clinical trial it was because we had insufficient efficacy, I.e. we couldn’t prove the new test was significantly (or any) better than existing tests (luckily also ours).
• hprotagonist 8y ago
  Washing out means that a clinical trial is halted for lack of efficacy. It means the drug candidate in question is safe to ingest, but also doesn't work to treat the condition it was designed to treat. "work" is defined as having met or exceeded predefined clinical endpoints; e.g., "cognitive assessment improves by x% on average in a cohort of Y thousand patients", or "blood cholesterol levels reduced by Z%" or whatever. It's important and sad to note, too, that the clinical targets of most modern alzheimers drug candidates are comparatively low bars. We're not shooting for a cure, we're shooting for things like "reliably slows down cognitive decline by 6 months", and we can't even do that.