Drugs Trials.

[copippin]

Can anyone tell me why a number of volunteers are used for any drugs trial as opposed to one volunteer at a time?If there was only one volunteer subjected to the initial dose to see if there were any adverse reactions it would have minimised the disaster which has recently occured.If there were no serious adverse reactions then a further volunteer could be tested and so on.I realise that this would be more time consuming but in light of the recent disaster,better safe than sorry.

[mkt]

You've made a good point but i think in research terms they need to conduct these trials on a larger scale otherwise any results wouldn't be considered conclusive. It could be that if they trialled on one at a time there may be no reaction to a drug so they administer more and then someone has a really bad reaction. Theyd probably argue that reactions could vary between people you see so it would be pointless, time consuming and financially draining to go one at a time. I agree that this latest occurence has been dreadful but they obviously believed the risks were minimal. Its probably taken years for this drug to get to this testing stage and could not have been forecasted to turn out as it has

[bernardo]

One of the questions which has been raised about the conduct of this experiment is why this was not done. It has been reported that this type of trial is often done with a delay of a few minutes between each person and the next.

[morg_monster]

they have to test on more than one person in total because people react to things differently, but on the other hand they can't test on too many at this early stage, so usually about 5 - 10 people will be tested (with a couple getting placebo).
As bernardo says, it does seem strange that they were all given the medicine pretty much at the same time (although there would probably have been a few minutes between them just due to the logistics of it). A few hours would have probably been more useful and probably wouldn't have cost much more. This way maybe only 1 or 2 people would have got the drug.
However - with hindsight of course comes wisdom, they weren't expecting this to happen because it has never happened before , I guess giving it to them at the same time seemed like an ok idea. I'm sure they'll change this now.