NPR aired a very interesting story on Alzheimer’s.
There were many important arguments presented for or against screening for Alzheimer’s. You can listen to the podcast here. In particular, since there is no treatment available, it seems pointless to screen for Alzheimer’s. However, if you want to participate in clinical trials that might someday stop or reverse Alzheimer's disease, it's important to screen for it. Here is the map of current ongoing clinical trials on Alzheimer's disease.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Treatment for Scorpion Stings
I'm excited to learn about FDA's approval of the first specific treatment for scorpion stings. Nature blog had a very interesting article about this clinical trial: A tiny trial of 15 people helps convince the US to approve a drug that takes the pain out of scorpion stings. You can see the locations of the current ongoing clinical trials related to scorpions below:
Monday, May 2, 2011
Tradjenta (Linagliptin) Tablets for Type 2 Diabetes
From FDA news release: FDA approves new treatment for Type 2 diabetes. The clinical trial mentioned in this news release seems to be this one: Safety and Efficacy of BI 1356 as Monotherapy or in Combination in Type 2 DM.
According to MedlinePlus, Type 2 Diabetes is a chronic (lifelong) disease marked by high levels of sugar (glucose) in the blood. The chronic (lifelong) part makes it very attractive target for Pharma. There are currently more than 60 clinical trials for Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2 including new clinical trials that use linagliptin, and other dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP4) inhibitors.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Chronic Pain in Advanced Cancer
Video from 2011 NIH Pain Consortium Symposium are now online and this year it was entitled "Mechanisms and Management of Overlapping Chronic Pain and Associated Conditions." There were many interesting presentations about chronic pain and I highly recommend it. Here, I'll briefly mention presentation by Dr. Michael J. Iadarola about New Approaches to Analgesia Involving TRPV1 Agonists and Allosteric Modulators. It provides excellent background information about ongoing clinical trial for Resiniferatoxin to Treat Severe Pain Associated With Advanced Cancer. Resiniferatoxin (RTX) is a natural product extracted from cactus-like plants that grow in some parts of Africa. You can learn more about this clinical trial by watching this video (5:27:29).
This clinical trial is at NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland and is currently recruiting participants. Please contact Angel Flight at NIH if you need help getting there.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
SEC Charges FDA Chemist
I read about this first in GoozNews, then in The Daily Extra and The Great Beyond. I just Googled FDA is a corrupt organization (about 56,200 results) and found a couple of interesting links, like fdaisevi and uselessfda.
If an FDA chemist can generate more than $3.6 million in illicit profits, I can imagine how much higher-ups can make. I won't be surprised if this is only the tip of the iceberg. The solution to this might be more transparent clinical trails, even when they are double-blinded. If public can have some input and it's not a simple go/no go decision, then FDA would be more trusted and leave less room for corruption. We definitely need next generation or 2.0 version of Open Clinical Trials.
If an FDA chemist can generate more than $3.6 million in illicit profits, I can imagine how much higher-ups can make. I won't be surprised if this is only the tip of the iceberg. The solution to this might be more transparent clinical trails, even when they are double-blinded. If public can have some input and it's not a simple go/no go decision, then FDA would be more trusted and leave less room for corruption. We definitely need next generation or 2.0 version of Open Clinical Trials.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Ipilimumab and Metastatic Melanoma
FDA approved Yervoy (ipilimumab) to treat patients with late-stage (metastatic) melanoma. I have found the Bloomberg report on this subject thanks to FierceBiotech feed. I recommend the Bloomberg report as it includes pricing and other useful info not available from other sources. The good news is that those who received the combination of Yervoy plus melanoma peptide vaccine (gp 100) or Yervoy alone lived an average of about 10 months, while those who received only the experimental vaccine lived an average of 6.5 months.
Since this drug is a monoclonal antibody, it can't be administered orally, otherwise it will be digested and won't reach its destination. In the clinical trial, it was done thought iv infusion over 90 minutes, every 3 weeks for 4 doses. The results of this clinical trial have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine - Improved Survival with Ipilimumab in Patients with Metastatic Melanoma. It's interesting that in the patent for Ipilimumab it was used for reducing the incidence of adverse events related to immunotherapy.
I'll keep an eye on other trials that use Ipilimumab, including this one, where it's used for non small cell lung cancer.
Since this drug is a monoclonal antibody, it can't be administered orally, otherwise it will be digested and won't reach its destination. In the clinical trial, it was done thought iv infusion over 90 minutes, every 3 weeks for 4 doses. The results of this clinical trial have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine - Improved Survival with Ipilimumab in Patients with Metastatic Melanoma. It's interesting that in the patent for Ipilimumab it was used for reducing the incidence of adverse events related to immunotherapy.
I'll keep an eye on other trials that use Ipilimumab, including this one, where it's used for non small cell lung cancer.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Embedding ClisMap Widget
ClisMap now has a new embed feature available at http://clismap.appspot.com/embed. If you are patient advocacy group, sponsor of clinical trials or any other site interested in clinical trials, this is a great widget for your site visitors to find clinical trials relevant for them. You can customize the size of this widget any way you like it. Here is an example of this widget which shows ongoing clinical trails around San Diego:
Click here to see the full screen version of this widget. You can also get to this site by right-clicking right above the upper blue line (any place right of the List item) and select This Frame -> Show Only This Frame on Firefox. This has been tested with all majors browser (Firefox, Chrome, IE and Safari). Enjoy!
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Welcome to ClisMap Blog
ClisMap is created to help you find clinical trials near you. One of the first things we discovered while working on it, is that largest amount of ongoing clinical trials are on Lung Cancer. We are not sure if it's because of tobacco taxes, but it's worth mentioning sponsors with largest number of clinical trials:
NIH recently videocasted NCI Clinical Trials and Translational Research Advisory Committee - March 2011 and I took a screenshot to put some perspectives on the dollar amount spent on clinical trials.
As you can see, in fiscal year of 2006, NCI allocated around $1 Billion in clinical trials. Note that this includes all NCI sponsored clinical trials, including breast, colon and other types of cancer. In comparison, federal government collected over $7.7 Billion in revenue from tobacco taxes in 2006 (see The Incidence of Tobacco Taxation) not to mention $15.2 Billion collected by state governments annually. How much did we benefit from this remains to be answered.
As it stands now, the law requires mandatory registration and results reporting for certain clinical trials of drugs, biologics, and devices. Currently, ClinicalTrials.gov seems to be lacking any information that would be actually useful for patients. ClisMap blog is indented to provide patient centric information in this regard and we look forward for your comments and suggestions.
| National Cancer Institute (NCI) | more than 526 trials |
| National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) | more than 162 trials |
| Pfizer | more than 140 trials |
As it stands now, the law requires mandatory registration and results reporting for certain clinical trials of drugs, biologics, and devices. Currently, ClinicalTrials.gov seems to be lacking any information that would be actually useful for patients. ClisMap blog is indented to provide patient centric information in this regard and we look forward for your comments and suggestions.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)