Thursday, April 30, 2009

ethical obstacle

In our search for alternative treatments for Mom, I found an article off Instapundit about the development of a technique that uses fat droplets as a delivery system for a tumor-suppressant gene. My father called the relevant folks up and discovered that Mom is not currently eligible for the clinical trial because she hasn't started regular treatment yet. There is, apparently, an ethical issue at work here, but I'm not sure exactly what it is. We need to call back and find out whether Mom will be eligible later. Many clinical trials limit the number of participants-- not to restrict the pool from which they're gathering data, but because of funding limits, number of available beds, etc.


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