Each September, pain advocates and specialists raise awareness about issues facing the millions of people living with chronic pain. One of the most pressing? The lack of treatments available to alleviate suffering. In this blog, we look at three top challenges of getting new pain drugs to market—and offer a potential solution.
Placebo response is a major source of noise in trial data analysis, muddying the results and making it more difficult to detect true treatment effect. We know that it’s a pressing problem for clinical trials that needs solving, but where does it come from in the first place? Patient psychology, expectations and baseline severity of the disease play a significant part of a patient’s placebo responsiveness.
The main objective of most clinical trials is to evaluate efficacy and safety of an experimental treatment. To do this, statisticians compare the response of the drug-treated group(s) of patients to the response of the placebo-treated group.
Adjustment for covariates helps clinical trial statisticians demonstrate differences in drug effect between groups of people. In this blog, we discuss what this means and how it can help improve analysis and interpretation of clinical trial data.
Patients are central to clinical trials – but the impact of patient psychology on clinical trial results is still poorly understated. In this blog, we discuss why psychology matters and how to better account for it in trial data.
Placebo effect and placebo response are often used interchangeably – despite being two different phenomena. In this blog, we highlight the differences—and why it matters. Placebos are an important part of clinical research. But the impact of placebo use is a long-discussed matter in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry. While helpful in determining drug efficacy, certain factors make using placebos as drug comparators rather complicated. Most will say placebo treatment