The savings from outsourcing clinical tests have been so great that over 90% of them are now contracted out.
But knowing it was behind Novartis, Merck gambled and moved immediately into large-scale clinical tests on more than 1, 000 patients.
If clinical tests can show that pactimibe can prevent the buildup of cholesterol in the arteries, it could be a very big seller indeed.
AstraZeneca has said its trial failed, but it has released no specifics, and it will be a while before OSI's clinical tests are done.
Researchers evaluated them for depression and dementia using standard clinical tests.
In U.S. clinical tests, 75% of 155 Parkinson's patients who had implanted Medtronic's Activa reported better motor function a year later, including reduced stiffness and less shaking.
It performs all types of clinical tests but also touts itself as a pioneer in gene-oriented tests for things such as HIV resistance and cervical cancer screening.
This is going to be an interesting story to watch over the coming months, both regarding the copyright of the MMSE and possibly enforcement of copyright of other clinical tests.
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While drugmakers seem to agree that new technology may eventually deliver a solution, for the moment they are faced with trying to recruit additional patients into clinical tests for their drugs.
At issue were assured emergency-room access, fuller information from doctors, easier access to clinical tests of new drugs, and, most controversial of all, the right to sue health insurers for sub-standard treatment.
Tularik announced after Monday's close that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has green-lighted the design of what could be the final clinical tests for the South San Francisco-based biotech's liver cancer drug, T67.
The biggest question remains how quickly tests such as this will move from being essentially research tools to being real clinical tests that are conducted in commercial laboratories and are paid for by insurers.
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The idea of treating disease by replacing a defective gene with a working copy gained credence in 1990 with the success of the world's first gene therapy clinical tests against a rare condition called severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID).
This consists of more than 20 clinical tests and is reckoned not only to enable doctors to distinguish patients in a vegetative state from those with minimal consciousness, but also to identify those who were previously in a minimally conscious state but have emerged from it.
"One of the lessons for companies trying to develop drugs is to listen to what the FDA tells you, " says Richard Goldberg , a professor of oncology at the Mayo Clinic, who is helping Sanofi run clinical tests that finally prove that Eloxatin should be the first-line drug against colorectal cancer.
One pick is Quest Diagnostics, the leading provider of clinical diagnostic tests for doctors and hospitals.
The FDA is responsible for reviewing clinical genetic tests.
In 2006, he underwent about eight hours of tests, which helped a clinical psychologist conclude that Sheppard had high-functioning autism.
Doubts aside, companies like Roche, Celera, Genomic Health and Clinical Data are racing forward with new gene tests.
Until these tests are developed, men should decide on screening based on their personal concerns and enter the clinical studies to help find out how good screening is and to help find better tests.
Dr Paul Pharoah, senior clinical research fellow at Cambridge University Cancer Centre, said such tests were not yet clinically meaningful.
But if a drug has already been through enough tests in cell cultures and lab animals to justify starting clinical trials, the odds of success have risen to one in nine.
Although developing new diagnostic techniques is cheap compared with developing new drugs (largely because they do not have to undergo such comprehensive and expensive clinical trials), it is frequently not cheap enough to create tests that will be commercially viable if their only market is in the poor world.
Dr Paul Jenkins, consultant endocrinologist and clinical director of Genetic Health - a UK company offering a variety of tests - said it was an evolving field.
Bruns, director of clinical chemistry at the University of Virginia and editor of Clinical Chemistry, says he has seen an increase in the number of tests cited in his medical journal.
It failed to perform key tests on experimental animals, or on small groups of people in clinical trials, before launching the pills on an unsuspecting public.
Less than three years ago, bioinformaticians at Stanford University set out to capture information buried, not just in insurance claims, lab tests or medical codes, but in the rich narrative of 10 million clinical notes gleaned from 1.8 million patients on Epic Systems electronic health records.
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So you'd probably find a 17th century doctor quite at home with the clinical examination side of medicine as it stands today, but of course all the diagnostic tests would be considered as witchcraft.
Clinical trials take several years to complete and, even if the vaccine passes this first stage of tests, more research will be needed over the course of many years.
An initial late-stage clinical trial involving hundreds of patients is already under way, but the FDA will require a second set of tests.
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