Newsweek offers its take on the use of social networking sites to recruit people for clinical trials. Sites like Inspire.com create the patient networks, communities that suffer from various ailments, and drug developers can tap into them for the patients they need to test a drug.
The drug developers' objective is simple. With an estimated 80 percent of all trials--there are 50,000 underway right now in the U.S.--delayed at least a month by low enrollment, the networking sites can offer a very targeted approach to getting exactly the right people in a trial in a timely fashion. Networking sites also help create an element of trust, something many pharma companies are notably lacking. Novartis, for example, used PatientsLikeMe.com to find the multiple sclerosis patients it needed for a trial in 2008.
But there are some pesky ethical questions that won't go away.
One issue, says Dianne Colaizzi, spokesperson for the Coalition of Cancer Cooperative Groups, "is how do patients discern the quality of the information they find on social-networking sites? Many of the sites lack high quality medical information from trusted sources." And then there's the possibility that patients in the same trial who communicate on the same social network will figure out who's on a new med and who's on a placebo. That could leave the whole double-blinded approach to clinical trials in the dust.
- check out the article in Newsweek