Modern medicine is sometimes accused of callous application of science to human problems and of subordinating the interest of the individual to those of the group (society).¹ Official regulatory bodies rightly require scientific evaluation of drugs. Drug developers need to satisfy the official regulators and they also seek to persuade the medical profession to prescribe their products. Patients, too, are more aware of the comparative advantages and limitations of their medicines than they used to be. To some extent, this helps encourage patients to participate in trials so that future patients can benefit, as they do now, from the knowledge gained from such trials. An ethical framework is required to ensure that the interests of the individual participant take precedence over those of society (and, more obviously, those of an individual or corporate investigator).

Research involving human subjects

The definition of research continues to present difficulties. The distinction between medical research and innovative medical practice derives from the intent. In medical practice the sole intention is to benefit the individual patient consulting the clinician, not to gain knowledge of general benefit, though such knowledge may incidentally emerge from the clinical experience gained. In medical research the primary intention is to advance knowledge so that patients in general may benefit; the individual patient may or may not benefit directly.²

Consider also the process of audit, which is used extensively to assess performance, e.g. by individual health-care workers, by departments within hospitals or between hospitals. Audit is a systematic examination designed to determine the degree to which an action or set of actions achieves predetermined standards. Whereas research seeks to address ‘known unknowns’ and often discovers ‘unknown unknowns,³ audit is limited to the monitoring of ‘known knowns’: maybe important, but clearly limited.

Ethics of research in humans ⁴

Some dislike the word ‘experiment’ in relation to humans, thinking that its mere use implies a degree of impropriety in what is done. It is better that all should recognise from the true meaning of the word, ‘to ascertain or establish by trial’,⁵ that the benefits of modern medicine derive almost wholly from experimentation and that some risk is inseparable from much medical advance.

The issue of (adequately informed) consent is a principal concern for Research Ethics Committees (also called Institutional Review Boards). People have the right to choose for themselves whether or not they will participate in research, i.e. they have the right to self-determination (the ethical principle of autonomy). They should be given whatever information is necessary for making an adequately informed choice (consent) with the right to withdraw at any stage. Consent procedures, especially information on risks, loom larger in research than they do in medical practice. This is appropriate given that in research, patients may be submitting themselves to extra risks, or simply to extra inconvenience (e.g. more or longer visits). It is a moot point whether more consent in routine practice might not go amiss. It is also likely that patients participating in well-conducted trials receive more, and sometimes better, care and attention than might otherwise be available. Sometimes the unintended consequences of ethical procedures include causing unnecessary apprehension to patients with long, legalistic documents, and creating a false impression of clinical researchers as people from whom patients need protection.

The moral obligation of all doctors lies in ensuring that in their desire to help patients (the ethical principle of beneficence) they should never allow themselves to put the individual who has sought their aid at any disadvantage (the ethical principle of non-maleficence) for ‘the scientist or physician has no right to choose martyrs for society’.⁶

In principle, it may be thought proper to perform a therapeutic trial only when doctors (and patients) have genuine uncertainty as to which treatment is best.⁷ Not all trials are comparisons of different treatments. Some, especially early phase trials of new drugs, are comparisons of different doses. Comparisons of new with old should usually offer patients the chance of receiving current best treatment with one which might be better. Since this is often rather more than is offered in resource-constrained routine care, the obligatory patient information sheet mantra that ‘the decision whether to take part has no bearing on your usual care’ may be economical with the truth. But it is also simplistic to view the main purpose of all trials with medicines as comparative.

The past decade has seen the pharmaceutical industry struggle to match the pace of new understanding about disease pathogenesis, and models of research are being adapted to the complexity of common disease that is now apparent. In diseases where many good medicines already exist, the industry spent much time developing minor modifications which were broadly equivalent to current therapy with possible advantages for some patients. With many of the standard blockbusters now off patent, new drugs for such diseases are unattractive, and the industry is concentrating more on harder therapeutic targets where no satisfactory treatment yet exists. Just as in basic science, non-hypothesis-led ‘fishing expedition’ research – genome scans, microarrays – is no longer frowned upon, so the imaginative clinical investigator must throw his stone – a new medicine – into the pond, and be able to make sense of the ripples. One such approach is to move away from trial design in which it is the average response of the group which is of interest towards the design in which the investigator attempts to match differences in response to differences – ethnic, gender, genetic – among the patients. Matches at a molecular level give clues both to how the drug may best be used, and who will benefit most.

The ethics of the randomised and placebo-controlled trial

Providing that ethical surveillance is rooted in the ethical principles of justice,⁸ there should be no difficulty in clinical research adapting to current needs. And even if the nature of early phase research is changing, the randomised controlled trial will remain the cornerstone of how cause and effect is proven in clinical practice, and how drugs demonstrate the required degree of efficacy and safety to obtain a licence for their prescription.

The use of a placebo (or dummy) raises both ethical and scientific issues (see placebo medicines and the placebo effect, Ch. 2). There are clear-cut cases when placebo use would be ethically unacceptable and scientifically unnecessary, e.g. drug trials in epilepsy and tuberculosis, when the control groups comprise patients receiving the best available therapy.

The pharmacologically inert (placebo) treatment arm of a trial is useful:

• To distinguish the pharmacodynamic effects of a drug from the psychological effects of the act of medication and the circumstances surrounding it, e.g. increased interest by the doctor, more frequent visits, for these latter may have their placebo effect. Placebo responses have been reported in 30–50% of patients with depression and in 30–80% with chronic stable angina pectoris.

• To distinguish drug effects from natural fluctuations in disease that occur with time, e.g. with asthma or hay fever, and other external factors, provided active treatment, if any, can be ethically withheld. This is also called the ‘assay sensitivity’ of the trial.

• To avoid false conclusions. The use of placebos is valuable in Phase 1 healthy volunteer studies of novel drugs to help determine whether minor but frequently reported adverse events are drug related or not. Although a placebo treatment can pose ethical problems, it is often preferable to the continued use of treatments of unproven efficacy or safety. The ethical dilemma of subjects suffering as a result of receiving a placebo (or ineffective drug) can be overcome by designing clinical trials that provide mechanisms to allow them to be withdrawn (‘escape’) when defined criteria are reached, e.g. blood pressure above levels that represent treatment failure. Similarly, placebo (or new drug) can be added against a background of established therapy; this is called the ‘add on’ design.

• To provide a result using fewer research subjects. The difference in response when a test drug is compared with a placebo is likely to be greater than that when a test drug is compared with the best current, i.e. active, therapy (see later).

Investigators who propose to use a placebo, or otherwise withhold effective treatment, should justify their intention. The variables to consider are:

• The severity of the disease.

• The effectiveness of standard therapy.

• Whether the novel drug under test aims to give only symptomatic relief, or has the potential to prevent or slow up an irreversible event, e.g. stroke or myocardial infarction.

• The length of treatment.

• The objective of the trial (equivalence, superiority or non-inferiority; see p. 45). Thus it may be quite ethical to compare a novel analgesic against placebo for 2 weeks in the treatment of osteoarthritis of the hip (with escape analgesics available). It would not be ethical to use a placebo alone as comparator in a 6-month trial of a novel drug in active rheumatoid arthritis, even with escape analgesia.

The precise use of the placebo will depend on the study design, e.g. whether crossover, when all patients receive placebo at some point in the trial, or parallel group, when only one cohort receives placebo. Generally, patients easily understand the concept of distinguishing between the imagined effects of treatment and those due to a direct action on the body. Provided research subjects are properly informed and give consent freely, they are not the subject of deception in any ethical sense; but a patient given a placebo in the absence of consent is deceived and research ethics committees will, rightly, decline to agree to this. (See also: Lewis et al (2002) in Guide to further reading, at the end of this chapter.)

Injury to research subjects ⁹

The question of compensation for accidental (physical) injury due to participation in research is a vexed one. Plainly there are substantial differences between the position of healthy volunteers (whether or not they are paid) and that of patients who may benefit and, in some cases, who may be prepared to accept even serious risk for the chance of gain. There is no simple answer. But the topic must always be addressed in any research carrying risk, including the risk of withholding known effective treatment. The CIOMS/WHO Guidelines ⁴ state:

Research subjects who suffer physical injury as a result of their participation are entitled to such financial or other assistance as would compensate them equitably for any temporary or permanent impairment or disability. In the case of death, their dependants are entitled to material compensation. The right to compensation may not be waived.

Therefore, when giving their informed consent to participate, research subjects should be told whether there is provision for compensation in case of physical injury, and the circumstances in which they or their dependants would receive it.

Payment of subjects in clinical trials

Healthy volunteers are usually paid to take part in a clinical trial. The rationale is that they will not benefit from treatment received and should be compensated for discomfort and inconvenience. There is a fine dividing line between this and a financial inducement, but it is unlikely that more than a small minority of healthy volunteer studies would now take place without a ‘fee for service’ provision, including ‘out of pocket’ expenses. It is all the more important that the sums involved are commensurate with the invasiveness of the investigations and the length of the studies. The monies should be declared and agreed by the ethics committee.

There is an intuitive abreaction by physicians to pay patients (compared with healthy volunteers), because they feel the accusation of inducement or persuasion could be levelled at them, and because they assuage any feeling of taking advantage of the doctor–patient relationship by the hope that the medicines under test may be of benefit to the individual. This is not an entirely comfortable position.¹⁰

Rational introduction of a new drug to humans

When studies in animals predict that a new molecule may be a useful medicine, i.e. effective and safe in relation to its benefits, then the time has come to put it to the test in humans. Most doctors will be involved in clinical trials at some stage of their career and need to understand the principles of drug development. When a new chemical entity offers a possibility of doing something that has not been done before or of doing something familiar in a different or better way, it can be seen to be worth testing. But where it is a new member of a familiar class of drug, potential advantage may be harder to detect. Yet these ‘me too’ drugs are often worth testing. Prediction from animal studies of modest but useful clinical advantage is particularly uncertain and, therefore, if the new drug seems reasonably effective and safe in animals it is rational to test it in humans. From the commercial standpoint, the investment in the development of a new drug can be over £500 million, but will be substantially less for a ‘me too’ drug entering an already developed and profitable market.

Phases of clinical development

Human experiments progress in a commonsense manner that is conventionally divided into four phases (Fig. 4.1). These phases are divisions of convenience in what is a continuous expanding process. It begins with a small number of subjects (healthy subjects and volunteer patients) closely observed in laboratory settings, and proceeds through hundreds of patients, to thousands before the drug is agreed to be a medicine by a national or international regulatory authority. It is then licensed for general prescribing (though this is by no means the end of the evaluation). The process may be abandoned at any stage for a variety of reasons, including poor tolerability or safety, inadequate efficacy and commercial pressures. The phases are:

• Phase 1. Human pharmacology (20–50 subjects):