Seen Robert Shapiro hawking LegalZoom.com? Well, according to the WSJ Health Blog on Thursday, soon the same kind of templates used to give you a quickie will or corporation could give you a cancer clinical trial.
Yes, clinical trials may soon be churned out template-style by some legal eagles, industry leaders, and corporate heads including AstraZeneca, Lilly, Pfizer, and Wyeth. Thanks to similar language used in between 75% to 80% of protocols now most trials can just be the same old language–but the real problem is that they are all the more likely to be rubber stamped.
Why wouldn’t they? They contain the same basic language, the same ethics sections for IRB purposes, and differ only in regard to the technical details of their protocols, why wouldn’t all these cancer clinical trials be all the more likely as their templates get more and more honed to sail through both scientific and ethics review? The answer is–they would.
Summer Johnson, PhD