Why clinical translation cannot succeed without failure

Abstract

The high rates of attrition that occur in drug development are widely regarded as problematic, but the failure of well-designed studies benefits both researchers and healthcare systems by, for example, generating evidence about disease theories and demonstrating the limits of proven drugs. A wider recognition of these benefits will help the biomedical research enterprise to take full advantage of all the information generated during the drug development process.

Keywords

• preclinical research
• clinical trials
• drug development
• ethics
• reproducibility
• translational research